From the standpoint of the Belarusian opposition, such a strike call is very understandable. For weeks, there has been massive demonstrations against the falsified presidential election result on 9 August, which Lukashenko says won with 80 percent of the vote.
Tens and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets to demand an end to the excessive police brutality. They are demonstrating for the release of countless political prisoners. Until now without any tangible result. Of course, a nationwide strike is much more successful: it causes major economic damage and that exerts heavy pressure on power.
No unions
But how do you get such a strike in a country that has no tradition of employee organization? There are hardly any independent trade unions, strike leaders have been arrested or fled abroad at an early stage of the protests. People who have the guts to quit their job nevertheless run a life-sized risk of losing their work, and thus their income, and ending up in jail.
That is not all. Not everyone in Belarus is against Lukashenko. Employees in the large state-owned companies in particular often owe their jobs to their loyalty to the regime. They can already see the storm coming when Lukashenko is gone.
Size too big
Meanwhile, Lukashenko uses bigger and bigger words. “We are facing a terrorist threat,” he claimed yesterday. And where he said earlier that the opposition had not yet crossed a red line, he now thinks that it has. Everything organized and coordinated from across the border, in Lithuania and Poland. The consequences are obvious: there will be even harder action against people who resist.
The opposition is in a difficult position. Demonstrating alone, however massive, will not be successful as long as Lukashenko can continue to rely on his police, his security services, his army and powerful neighbor Russia.
In her call for a nationwide strike, Tichanovskaya has pulled on big pants, hoping to stir up the conflict with the man who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for 26 years. For the time being, those pants seem a size too big.
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