Belarus Presidential Elections: Lukashenko opponent Valery Tsepkalo flees to Russia fearing arrest

July 28th, 2020

Awake Goy

On May 8, Belarussians awoke to rare news. Valery Tsepkalo, an architect of their nation’s tech industry, was calling for a revolution. “I dream of a country,” Tsepkalo wrote on Facebook, “where people own property. Where people openly, freely and without fear can express their opinion. A country where vulgarity and rudeness will be eliminated from the political leadership.”

Tsepkalo, a 55-year-old politics grad, began his diplomatic career as Lukashenko’s ambassador to the US and Mexico from 1997 to 2002. Enchanted by America’s tech scene, Tsepkalo founded incubator Hi-Tech Park (HTP) in a quiet corner of Minsk, Belarus’s capital city, in 2005. Local entrepreneurs, enticed by massive tax breaks, flocked. In 2009 Tsepkalo told Der Spiegel he believed a “Belarusian Silicon Valley” was emerging.

He was right. Today, HTP is home to a quarter of Belarus’ thousand-plus startups. Technology and science products now constitute over a third of the country’s exports. In the past five years, Belarus’ software exports grew by a staggering 20 times. EPAM Systems Inc., an outsourcing firm founded in 1993, has revenues of £2.3 billion and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

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Lukashenko called the Internet “garbage,” and entrepreneurs “lousy fleas.” He struggled to pronounce “iPhone”. But the sector’s success has forced him to U-turn, and in recent years Lukashenko has been ‘hello fellow kids’-ing an industry now worth around 6.5 per cent of his GDP.

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“[The] creation of an IT state is our ambitious but reachable goal,” Lukashenko told bureaucrats in 2017. That year, he granted visa-free entry to citizens of 79 countries, and legalised transfers in cryptocurrency – a move designed to attract blockchain startups. Rich Belarusian tech entrepreneurs started travelling all over the world, bringing back enviable tales of democracy and free media.

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That year Lukashenko also sacked Tsepkalo as head of HTP. Tsepkalo – slim, bald, perennially besuited – then wandered the former USSR, teaching governments how to build their own Silicon Valleys. In 2018 he founded Prabook.com, a biographic library that looked a lot like Wikipedia.

On May 8 2020, Tsepkalo suddenly returned to Belarusian politics. The announcement that day, to run against his former boss, left little room for pleasantries.

Recession has already hit Belarus, reliant on oil and machinery exports, hard. Lukashenko joked morbidly that compatriots would come at him “with pitchforks” if the economy worsens. It will. The World Bank says Belarus’ economy will shrink by 4 per cent this year.

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Lukashenko’s refusal to enact a 1999 pact with Russia, which would unite the two countries under Kremlin rule, has worsened his ties with Vladimir Putin, who in December halted vital energy supplies to Minsk. Belarusians are overwhelmingly in favour of keeping their national sovereignty, and now fear a Ukraine-style Russian invasion.

All this should be fertile ground for Tsepkalo, whose message of economic liberalisation and personal freedom may chime with an electorate hemmed in by fiscal entropy and a bullying, autocratic neighbour. But the success of his pitch is far from evident. A recent poll showed up to 50 per cent of voters favour Victor Babariko, a philanthropist and former banker with close ties to Moscow, who, like Tsepkalo, supports sweeping privatisation and a two-term limit on the presidency. Just ten per cent went for Lukashenko. But even fewer chose Tsepkalo, who “comes across to many as a geek,” Grigory Ioffe, a professor of human geography at Radford University, tells me. “His candidacy is not top-notch in terms of popular perception.” Tsepkalo has maintained a high presence on the Web and social media. But just two-thirds of Belarusians are online – one of the lowest rates in Europe.

Moreover, says Ioffe, techies do not exactly have popular appeal. “[They are] earning much less money than their colleagues abroad, but much, much more than their fellow countrymen. So they’re not that universally loved.”

Minsk may be the country’s powerhouse, with over a fifth of its citizens and 53 per cent of its wealth. But it is often cut off from the rest of the nation’s voters. That might hamper attempts to beat Lukashenko at the ballot box: his popularity in Belarus’ towns and forested hinterlands – where many call him “batka”, or “daddy” – is still strong. Journalist Iryna Vldanava puts it more simply: “Tsepkalo is a Minsk candidate, not a Belarus candidate.”