Mass media: Government purges held in run up to"election"

Dismissal of Mikhail Myasnikovich is on the horizon.

Yesterday instead of the much-heralded consultations on economic issues, Alyaksandr Lukashenka appointed a new Finance Minister, and changed the mayor of Minsk.

The ruler sticks to his promise to bring new players into his team in the run-up to the presidential election. The main thing that keeps in suspense is whether the current Prime Minister Mikhail Myasnikovich is going to remain in his office.

Yesterday Alyaksandr Lukashenka dismissed the chairman of Minsk city council Mikalai Ladutska. Recently there have been many complaints about his work. Andrei Sharets, a former Young Communist league activist and Housing and public utilities minister was appointed instead of him. The office of Finance minister, which had been empty for some time, was occupied by Uladzimir Amarin, “Nezavisimaya gazeta” writes.

Truly speaking, what was expected in Minsk yesterday was not a reshuffle, but a large-scale panel meeting with the president, to sum up the nine months of work and to make plans for the next year. Alyaksandr Lukashenka promised a broad-scale debriefing to members of the government as far back as in the end of the last year. But he changed his mind and gave them a chance to correct their faults in the first quarter of 2014. Then he extended his act of grace to the end of the first half of the year.

And now the agenda is the results of the work over the nine months of the year and economic forecast documents for the next year. According to the preliminary plans, the meeting was to be held on Thursday, however by the end of the day reports said it was postponed for the nearest Tuesday.

One of these days during the working visit to Mahilyou Lukashenka stated that he was not going to confine himself to drawing up the overall results of government’s work and adopting plans for the next year, but to subject to revision all directions of the Belarusian economy. “We shall gather and see how talented our team in agriculture is, have they got the picture of the negative trends properly, and have they offered the right decisions on certain issues,” he warned. The housing and utilities sector expects the same debriefing, though a little later. “We shall discuss this topic in winter,” Lukashenka said.

Lukashenka explained his desire to communicate with leading personnel by the fact that before the presidential “election” he is trying to form “new leading personnel in the country.” “Those who are observing appointments of personnel to the senior positions, could not fail to notice that new faces have appeared, and this process is not going to stop tomorrow,” he said. “There is a practice that before the presidential election the nation should clearly see the team he will work after this election.”

By the way, so far there have been no significant appointments to the key economic positions, and according to a number of observers, it could mean that consultations on economic issues, much expected by officials and economically active community, is to be finished by a dismissal of Prime Minister Myasnikovich.

The grounds for such predictions are first of all the results: even according to the official data, the economic growth has slowed down and is 1.5% according to the results of January-September, while the forecast was 3.3%. The exports have not increased by 8.6% as had been planned, on the contrary they dropped by 9%, despite the talks about foreign investments, there is no inflow: a little more than 1 bn dollars over the six months, while 4.5 bn dollars had been planned.

However, 13.4% of inflation over the nine months exceed all expectations, as the government and the National Bank pledged not to exceed 11% over the year. The population feels all the economic problems with the help of their purses – real income remains almost at the level of the last year (100.8% of the last year’s level). In September they even decreased a little, by 0.2%. The average salary remains at the level of 550 in dollar equivalent. In the Russian market the demand for Belarusian manufactured goods has dropped, and as a result, goods are amassed at the stocks, plants work a part-time working week, and employees are ordered to take leaves without pay from time to time.

Photo: tut.by