Year of People’s Unity

Opinion: Society consolidation in Belarus will begin in 2021

An archive photo

MINSK, 11 January (BelTA) – The consolidation of the society in Belarus will begin in 2021. Aleksei Dzermant, a political analyst and a research worker of the Philosophy Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus, made the statement during a video interview hosted by the YouTube channel of the National Press Center of Belarus to discuss vectors of the country’s political development in 2021, BelTA has learned.

The analyst singled out two key events of 2020. The coronavirus epidemic is one of them. “As the epidemic evolved, we saw how it affected the state of the society. Certain fear came first. It was followed by the lack of understanding of what we are dealing with. Belarus chose its own way of fighting the pandemic, which, as we can see now, turned out to be quite far-sighted and successful. Nevertheless, a certain number of citizens were at a loss because information waves were raging all around them. With the arrival of the second wave of the coronavirus the population saw it differently and the healthcare system learned how to tackle it because we now understand what we are dealing with,” Aleksei Dzermant said.

In his words, the pandemic has had an effect on certain political moods. It coincided with the presidential election, which was the second key event of 2020. “Part of the population became involved in protest activities. Many of them due to the psychosis they had been experiencing since spring 2020. Apart from that, quite a massive political technology attack against us had an effect on it, too. I believe this presidential election was unprecedented from the point of view of the very serious usage of political technologies. We’ve never encountered such a thing in many aspects. Clear plans were made for the sphere of politics and the sphere of information,” the analyst noted. “One way or another it will have an effect on events of the year 2021. But definitely not in such a pronounced form. We see that people learn how to live with an epidemic. And many citizens, who were initially bitter in August-September, are now coming to their senses and understand that it is impossible to change anything in any country with those actions they staged in an effort to achieve something. Because changes can be implemented only through legal methods.”

Aleksei Dzermant added: “I think the year 2021, which has been declared the Year of People’s Unity, will be different one way or another as far as mood is concerned. I am convinced that the consolidation of the society will begin and we will feel like a united instead of a split one. I think everyone understands that it will make us stronger. In the modern world it is better to be in a state of general consensus instead of disarray.”

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