Less and less candidates left

22.09.2008. Tags: elections-2008, United democratic forces.
Source: RFE/RL.

Less and less candidates continue to participate in the election to the Chamber of Representatives. 270 candidates continue the struggle for 110 mandates. CEC secretary Mikalai Lazavik gave this number to RFE/RL today. Out of 270 candidates, 69 represent the United Democratic Forces.

In the unified list of UDF candidates the United Civic Party is represented by 18 people, BPF Party and Party of Communists of Belarus – by 14 each, and the Belarusian Social Democratic Party (Hramada) is represented by 10. The rest are non-partisan, head of the UDF information center Yury Patsiomkin reports.

“According to the prior information 69 candidates are left in the unified list. Recently some candidates have dropped out, most of them were running in Minsk. These candidates are 5 people from the UCP, some of them are such well-known figures as Alexander Dabravolski, Valiantsina Palevikova, and Stanislau Bahdankevich. Besides that, earlier several BPF members and three UCP members withdrew their candidacies. As far as I know, today or tomorrow deputy chairman of BPF Party Aliaksei Yanukevich is going to drop out. He also ran in Minsk”.

CEC secretary Mikalai Lazavik says, not only the opposition candidates drop out from the race. He gave the example of Viktar Anikeyenka, head of the agrarian commission of the current Chamber of Representatives:

“I should say not only the opposition members drop out. According to my personal observations, when the opposition candidates see strong opponents, they start looking for pretexts to have their registration cancelled. If they don’t manage to provoke the election commission to cancel their registration, they invent their own reasons to drop out”.