Neil Buckley: Arab wave unlikely to hit former Soviet states
[Neil Buckley is the FT's Eastern Europe Editor.]
The jubilant scenes on Cairo’s Tahrir Square that greeted the fall of Hosni Mubarak have been likened to those that accompanied the toppling of communist regimes across eastern Europe in 1989. But in many states inside the former Soviet Union democracy never fully took root. So, could the wildfires of Tunisia and Egypt spread to them?
Some are already making bold forecasts. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, this month warned Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarus president who crushed opposition protests in December: “Sooner or later you will be forced to flee, chased by your own people”.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, authoritarian president of Kazakhstan in former Soviet central Asia, performed a pre-emptive political U-turn. He scrapped a planned referendum that could have kept him in power until 2020, bypassing two elections, and instead called a snap presidential poll for April.
In nearby Tajikistan tensions stirred last week as an Islamist opposition group censured the government of Imomali Rahmon. It complained of “authoritarian state leadership, corruption, [and] the trampling of religious and political rights” after a mysterious attack on a senior party activist.
The speed and unexpectedness with which events developed in Tunisia and Egypt make it foolish to bet against the “Arab wave” sweeping into the ex-Soviet space...
Read entire article at Financial Times (UK)
The jubilant scenes on Cairo’s Tahrir Square that greeted the fall of Hosni Mubarak have been likened to those that accompanied the toppling of communist regimes across eastern Europe in 1989. But in many states inside the former Soviet Union democracy never fully took root. So, could the wildfires of Tunisia and Egypt spread to them?
Some are already making bold forecasts. Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, this month warned Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarus president who crushed opposition protests in December: “Sooner or later you will be forced to flee, chased by your own people”.
Nursultan Nazarbayev, authoritarian president of Kazakhstan in former Soviet central Asia, performed a pre-emptive political U-turn. He scrapped a planned referendum that could have kept him in power until 2020, bypassing two elections, and instead called a snap presidential poll for April.
In nearby Tajikistan tensions stirred last week as an Islamist opposition group censured the government of Imomali Rahmon. It complained of “authoritarian state leadership, corruption, [and] the trampling of religious and political rights” after a mysterious attack on a senior party activist.
The speed and unexpectedness with which events developed in Tunisia and Egypt make it foolish to bet against the “Arab wave” sweeping into the ex-Soviet space...