MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 11th August, 2020) As the controversy is brewing increasingly tense in Belarus among the public and opposition following the presidential election, Sputnik has spoken to German lawmakers to find out whether they think the European Union should intervene or not.
The preliminary results of the Belarusian presidential election, held this past Sunday, suggest incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko won over 80 percent of the vote, while the key opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, won just above 10 percent.
"I do not rule out manipulation attempts," Waldemar Herdt, a member of the German parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, told Sputnik, but added that "the principle of non-interference is something that should be a top priority."
While the outcome of the election "doesn't seem to please everyone," as put by the lawmaker, he pointed to that the vote was "open, free and recognized by all."
Moreover, describing the EU as "falling back into old patterns," Herdt said interference in other states' domestic affairs "brings little results and tends to have a negative effect," as was the case in the middle East and in Ukraine.
"It makes me sad that there are forces who, under the guise of democracy, pursue their own interests and claims to hegemony. And it is particularly disappointing that the EU, as the alleged cradle of democracy, is behaving in a way that essentially equates to lobbying. My appeal once again to everyone: to refrain from any interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state," Herdt said.
Now the lawmaker fears that Belarus risks seeing its post-election protests decline into a breakdown of a democratic legal order.
"Therefore I urge caution in hasty judgments and reactions to the internal processes of a sovereign state," the Herdt added.
According to another AfD lawmaker, Sergey Henke, the EU, on the contrary, has "not only the right but also the responsibility" to intervene in the aftermath of the Belarusian presidential vote, because it is a matter of the protection of human rights.
"Human rights are universal. They have no borders and they require that any politician who wants their policies to be considered morally impeccable react to the violation of those rights," the lawmaker said.
At the same time, Henke doubts that Brussels would take any concrete action because it is being held back by Germany which currently struggles to maneuver its long-promoted moral narrative on human rights.
"When it comes to Merkel's Eastern European policy, she is under a great public strain at the moment. She has fallen into a vice: on one side is the ostentatious moral pretension, when, for example, she welcomed millions of migrants, while on the other side is the demand by the public, economy and part of the political establishment to remove sanctions from Russia and thus abandon that moral pretension," Henke said, adding that the German chancellor "will be maneuvering and saying the right things, but she will not do a thing in practice."
After polling stations closed on Sunday evening, protests engulfed Minsk until the morning of Monday. Police used water cannons, stun grenades and, according to several sources, rubber bullets to disperse the protesters. Clashes ensued and an unspecified number of people were arrested.
Tikhanovskaya, in the meantime, refused to recognize the vote's results and claimed that her actual support was up to 70-80 percent.
