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Candidates should be legislatively prohibited from campaigning for election boycott, Yarmoshyna says

Candidates should be legislatively prohibited from campaigning for an election boycott, Lidziya Yarmoshyna, head of the central election commission, said on Wednesday during a question-and-answer session hosted by the government's news agency BelTA.

Like the regulations of all other counties, Belarusian laws were designed with "law-abiding citizens" in mind, Ms. Yarmoshyna said. "When we say 'electioneering,' we mean that a candidate goes out and campaigns for himself or, at worst, against someone," she said. "We could not even imagine that state money would be used to campaign against participation in elections, which are, once again, organized with state money."

It turned out that candidates are different, and that some of them "feel no gratitude to the state and behave accordingly, disrupting what was organized by this state," Ms. Yarmoshyna said.

It is necessary to devise a separate set of regulations that would govern campaigning for a boycott of elections and prohibit such campaigning at the government's expense, she said.

Candidates should not be allowed to hold campaign events without applying for permission to local authorities if those events are used to promote an election boycott, Ms. Yarmoshyna said.

She suggested that the right to nominate contenders for the House of Representatives should be extended to "very large" non-governmental organizations, she said. On the one hand, it is becoming more difficult to collect the required number of ballot-access signatures for objective reasons, as people do not want to open their doors to signature-collectors, she said. On the other hand, it is wrong that 22 people who participate in a convention of the United Civic Party nominate 52 contenders, while trade unions with tens of thousands of members have no right to nominate, she said.

In addition, candidates should not be prohibited from contributing more than 20 times the Base Rate, or two million rubels, to their personal campaign funds, Ms. Yarmoshyna said. "If a person has money, let him contribute a thousand times the Base Rate, if he likes," she said. To bypass the contribution restrictions, some candidates ask other people to donate their money into their funds, she said. //BelaPAN