How referendums moved power in Belarus to the presidency

How referendums rewrote the Belarusian constitution

The constitution in force was adopted on 15 March 1994 by the Supreme Council, the chamber Britannica calls the Supreme Soviet. The presidential portal calls it the first constitution in the history of sovereign Belarus and the fifth in succession since the October Revolution of 1917, and 15 March is kept as Constitution Day. That chamber had been elected in March 1990, and candidates of the pro-independence Belarusian Popular Front took about 10% of the seats. The 1994 text created the office of president. Alexander Lukashenko won the election held in two rounds in June and July 1994, with 45% of the vote in the first round and 80% in the second, against a field that included the prime minister, Vyacheslav Kebich, who received 14%.

The constitution has since been changed four times, and three of those changes were made by the voters directly. The official portal belarus.by lists national referendums on 24 November 1996, 17 October 2004 and 27 February 2022. The fourth change was ordinary legislation: Law No. 124-З of 12 October 2021 moved the parliamentary elections onto a single voting day. A fifth vote, on 14 May 1995, changed the state flag and arms and ended the exclusive status of Belarusian as the state language; it altered the symbols without amending the text on government, and Belarus: history follows it.

The route matters because the text makes the referendum stronger than the legislature. Under Article 140 of the 2004 text, a constitutional change passes through the National Assembly only with two thirds of the elected members of both chambers, voting twice at least three months apart, and never in the last six months of the lower house's term. A change put to referendum needs a majority of all citizens on the electoral roll. Articles 1, 2, 4 and 8, which define the state, the supreme value of the person, political diversity and the priority of international law, can be changed only by referendum. Article 77 adds that a decision taken by referendum can be reversed only by another one.

Who can call a national vote is set in Article 74. The president can. So can either chamber, by a majority of its full membership, and so can 450,000 citizens, provided at least 30,000 of them come from each of the six regions and from Minsk. In May 1992 the Belarusian Popular Front gathered about 383,000 signatures for a referendum on early elections, 23,000 more than the law then required, and the Supreme Council rejected the petition on grounds of irregularities; the Wikipedia history finds no evidence offered for that claim.

What the Supreme Council lost to the presidency

The first parliament under the new constitution took most of 1995 to assemble. Britannica records that a candidate needed 50% of the vote on a turnout of 50% of eligible voters to be seated, so four rounds of voting were held before a quorum was reached in December 1995, and even then more than 60 seats stayed empty. The largest bloc in the chamber was a group supporting the president, and no party.

The referendum of 24 November 1996 replaced that chamber. Britannica describes a constitutional change that gave the president near-absolute power and extended his term, carried in a vote whose legitimacy was widely disputed. The parliamentary opposition tried to impeach the president and to abolish the office. The revised text was signed instead, and it closed the Supreme Council. Its transitional articles show how. Article 143 formed the new House of Representatives from those deputies of the Supreme Council who had been elected by the date of the referendum, and it authorised the president to dissolve the Supreme Council outright if the two could not agree on forming the House within a month. Article 144 let the president keep his powers and counted his term from the day the revised constitution entered into force.

The Wikipedia account describes the vote as extending the presidential term from five years to seven. The text as published keeps a five-year term, and the restart of the count in Article 144 is what moved the next presidential election from 1999 to 2001. Viktar Hanchar, the chief electoral officer, called the referendum a "fantastic" fake and was removed from office during the campaign. The Wikipedia article on Belarusian politics later lists him, with the opposition leader Yury Zacharanka and the journalists Dzmitry Zavadski and Veronika Cherkasova, among the cases of disappearance or death under the government that followed.

The Council of Europe barred Belarus from membership in 1997, citing irregularities in the 1996 referendum and in the parliamentary by-elections of that year. Belarus had applied to join in 1993. The Council's Venice Commission found the revised constitution "illegal" and said it "does not respect minimum democratic standards".

How law is made through the presidency

The 2004 text gives the right to propose laws to the president, to members of either chamber, to the government and to 50,000 voters. Article 99 then narrows it. A bill that would reduce state revenue or raise spending can be introduced only with the president's consent, or at his instruction by the government. The president can declare a bill urgent, which gives each chamber ten days to deal with it, and can require the chambers to vote on a presidential or government bill as a whole, keeping only the amendments the president or the government has accepted.

A bill passes with a majority of the full membership of the House of Representatives, then goes to the Council of the Republic, which has twenty days to consider it and is deemed to approve it if it lets the time run out. The president has two weeks to sign. A returned bill becomes law against the president's objections only if two thirds of the full membership of each chamber vote for it again.

Decrees carry the weight. Article 85 lets the president issue decrees and orders binding across the whole territory. Under Article 101 the two chambers may delegate power to issue decrees with the force of law, and the president may also issue temporary decrees with the force of law on his own initiative "in instances of necessity". Such a decree goes to the House within three days and remains valid unless two thirds of the full membership of both chambers reject it. A temporary decree therefore needs no vote in its favour to survive, and the chambers need two thirds to undo it.

Article 84 lists thirty presidential powers. They include appointing the prime minister with the consent of the House, appointing and dismissing every other member of the government without it, chairing government meetings at will, cancelling acts of the government, suspending the decisions of local councils, declaring a state of emergency subject to the Council of the Republic's approval within three days, and deferring or suspending a strike for up to three months. Annual messages to parliament are, in the words of the text, "not open to discussion" in either chamber.

Who sits in the Belarusian National Assembly

The National Assembly has two chambers of unequal origin. The House of Representatives has 110 deputies elected directly; the Council of the Republic represents territory, with eight members chosen from each of the six regions and from Minsk by meetings of local council deputies from among their own number, and eight appointed by the president. That gives 64 under the 2004 text. The Inter-Parliamentary Union records the statutory total of both chambers as 174 from 2005 and 175 from March 2022, after the latest referendum.

Parties are thin in the chamber. After the parliamentary election of 2012, 105 of the 110 members of the House belonged to no party; the Communist Party of Belarus took 3 seats and two other parties one each. Most of the non-partisan members came from workers' collectives and public associations, a composition the Wikipedia article compares with the Soviet legislature. In the elections of 2004 no party won a seat, either among those supporting the president or among the opposition coalition, and in 2008, on a turnout the government put at about three quarters, the opposition again won none. The opposition boycotted the election of 2012.

Women held 37 of the 109 occupied seats in the House in December 2024, or 33.9%, against 4.5% in January 1996 and 40.0% in November 2019, by the Inter-Parliamentary Union's count. Members of the House work in the chamber full time and may at the same time sit in the government. Two regular sessions a year are fixed in the text itself, opening on 2 October for at most 80 days and on 2 April for at most 90.

Why Belarusian parties struggle to register

Party politics was weak from the start. Stanislav Shushkevich, chairman of the Supreme Soviet, observed at the beginning of 1993 that almost 60% of Belarusians supported no party, with 3.9% backing the communists and 3.8% the Popular Front. The Communist Party of Byelorussia was suspended after the August 1991 coup attempt, its members regrouped as the Party of Communists of Belarus, registered in December 1991, and the ban on the old party was lifted in February 1993.

Registration became the filter afterwards. The Wikipedia article on Belarusian politics records that the Ministry of Justice refused every application to register a new party from 2000 onward. Belarusian Christian Democracy applied seven times and the Party of Freedom and Progress four. One refusal to a local branch of the Popular Front in Hrodna Region cited "incorrect line spacing"; one to the Christian Democrats cited missing telephone numbers for some founders, another the charter's requirement that members be "supporters of a Christian worldview". Acting in the name of an unregistered party risks prosecution, so groups apply instead as associations or institutions, where many are refused as well.

Britannica summarises the result as political success tied to loyalty to the president more than to party. Article 5 of the constitution still says that parties contribute to expressing the political will of citizens and take part in elections, and Article 4 that democracy rests on a diversity of political institutions, ideologies and opinions. The president suspends party membership for the whole term under Article 86.

Who appoints the judges and the election commission

Appointment runs through the president. Article 84 gives the president the chairmen of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the Supreme Economic Court, the judges of the Supreme and Economic Courts, the chairman of the Central Election Commission, the prosecutor-general and the board of the National Bank, each with the consent of the Council of the Republic, and the power to dismiss all of them with notice to that chamber. Six of the twelve members of the Central Commission on Elections and National Referenda, and six of the twelve judges of the Constitutional Court, are appointed by the president directly, and the other six in each are elected by the Council of the Republic, a chamber of which one member in eight is also a presidential appointee.

The Constitutional Court rules on whether laws, decrees, edicts and treaties conform to the constitution, but only on reference from the president, either chamber, the Supreme Court, the Supreme Economic Court or the government. The list in the 2004 text does not include individual citizens. The court also holds a power over parliament itself: at the president's request it may find that a chamber of parliament has systematically and grossly violated the constitution, and on that finding the president may dissolve the chamber under Article 94.

Article 24 keeps the death penalty "until its abolition" as an exceptional punishment for especially grave crimes. Two men convicted of the Minsk metro bombing of April 2011 were executed in 2012, and in 2023 a law extended capital punishment to officials and soldiers convicted of high treason.

How the regions of Belarus are governed from above

The state is unitary by Article 1. Below Minsk, which has the status of a region, sit six regions named after their centres, Brest, Gomel, Grodno, Mogilev, Minsk and Vitebsk, and 118 districts. Each region and district has an elected council and an executive committee, and the executive is appointed from above. The president appoints the chairman of each regional executive, the regional executive appoints the district chairmen, and district executives recommend the chairmen of the smaller units, whom the local councils may approve or reject.

At the base are 1,151 village councils, 14 councils of towns under district authority and 8 of urban-type settlements. A presidential decree of October 1995 abolished the local governments of district centres that were towns or settlements, demoting them to units run by the council of another body. The president may also suspend the decisions of any local council and cancel those of local executives under Article 84, and the Council of the Republic may dissolve a local council that systematically violates the law.

The Council of the Republic is elected by local deputies region by region, so the councils that sit beside appointed executives also choose 56 of its 64 members.

Where Belarus stands among its alliances

The Byelorussian republic sat in the United Nations from 1945 as one of its 51 original members. On 8 December 1991 Shushkevich signed, with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine, the accords that replaced the Soviet Union with the Commonwealth of Independent States, and Belarus has belonged to it since. It joined the Collective Security Treaty Organization in 1994, the Non-Aligned Movement in 1998 and the Eurasian Economic Union in 2014, and it is a participating state of the OSCE. The Union State with Russia was built by treaties from 1996 to 1999, including the foundation treaty of 1999, and was meant to bring a common currency, single citizenship and common foreign and defence policy. The currency has repeatedly been delayed and no referendum date has been set for the union's draft constitution.

The 2004 text said in Article 18 that Belarus aimed to make its territory a nuclear-free zone and the state neutral. Britannica records that the referendum of February 2022, held while Russian forces were attacking Ukraine from Belarusian soil, renounced neutral status and opened the way to a permanent Russian garrison that included nuclear weapons, and that it gave Lukashenko lifetime immunity from prosecution. The state's own summaries of the same referendum do not agree with each other on its extent: the presidential portal counts the preamble and 85 articles revised, 11 added and 2 removed, and belarus.by counts 83 articles amended, 11 added and one new chapter.

Relations with the West have run through sanctions and withdrawn ambassadors. The European Union sanctioned 21 more officials in early 2012 and its members then withdrew their ambassadors. The United States has had no ambassador in Minsk since 2007. Belarus joined the European Union's Eastern Partnership in 2009 and suspended its participation on 28 June 2021. After the presidential election of August 2020 the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States declined to recognise the declared result, and Lithuania gave the main opposition candidate that year, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, a residence in Vilnius.