{"id":199555,"date":"2021-11-22T12:00:01","date_gmt":"2021-11-22T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=199555"},"modified":"2021-11-16T06:17:54","modified_gmt":"2021-11-16T06:17:54","slug":"the-autocrats-are-winning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/11\/the-autocrats-are-winning\/","title":{"rendered":"The Autocrats Are Winning"},"content":{"rendered":"
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If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies\u2014communism, fascism, virulent nationalism\u2014the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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15 Nov 2021 – <\/em>The future of democracy<\/span> may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team\u2014more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists\u2014was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn\u2019t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won<\/a> the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.<\/p>\n

Here is the first thing she said to me: \u201cMy story is a little bit different from other people.\u201d This is what she tells everyone\u2014that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician. Before the spring of 2020, she didn\u2019t have much time for television or newspapers. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park.<\/p>\n

Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. These videos yielded a YouTube channel; the channel attracted thousands of followers. He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase \u201cReal News\u201d<\/span> plastered on the side. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,\u201d Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. \u201cBut step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn\u2019t afraid.\u201d He wasn\u2019t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it; his absence of fear inspired others. He decided to run for president. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei\u2019s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. It ended his campaign and arrested him.<\/p>\n

Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than \u201cto show my love for him.\u201d The police and bureaucrats let her. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Unlike her husband, she was afraid. She woke up \u201cso scared\u201d every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. But she kept going. Which was, though she doesn\u2019t say so, incredibly brave. \u201cYou feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Read: When women lead protest movements<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success\u2014not despite her inexperience, but because of it. Her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people standing up to the regime. Two other prominent opposition politicians endorsed her after their own campaigns were blocked, and when the wife of one of them and the female campaign manager of the other were photographed alongside Tsikhanouskaya<\/a>, her campaign became something more: a campaign about ordinary women<\/a>\u2014women who had been neglected, women who had no voice, even just women who loved their husbands. In return, the regime targeted<\/a> all three of these women. Tsikhanouskaya received an anonymous threat: Her children would be \u201csent to an orphanage.\u201d She dispatched them with her mother abroad, to Vilnius, and kept campaigning.<\/p>\n

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