Liabedzka's initiative team fails to collect 100,000 signatures

Anatol Liabedzka is the only democratic politician who risked his reputation and dared join the company of freaks.

The fact that the initiative group failed to collect 100,000 signatures to nominate leader of the United Civil Party Anatol Liabedzka as a presidential candidate doesn't discredit the party.

The prospective candidate said it in an interview with BelaPAN news agency, Belorusski Partizan reports.

“Perhaps our opponents will regard it as a discredit. But our supporters are most likely to regard it as an honest act. I think if proposed lie, deception and frauds on the one side and honest sincere acts on the other side, a neutral person will chose the latter,” Liabedzka said.

According to him, the opposition “must differ from the authorities, and the simplest and the most available way to do it is to be honest”.

Liabedzka thinks one shouldn't “absolutise any numbers”. “If we ran in real elections, we would do our best to collect 100,000 signatures. I guarantee it, because we didn't use many opportunities. It was an experiment. We formed a group of volunteers. We don't have a single false signature, because there's no sense in falsifying them,” he stressed.

“We wanted to get more signatures, but we did what we could. We don't have Lidziya Yarmoshyna and her ideological relatives in our team. We will submit as many signatures as we collected. We must differ from these deceitful authorities in anything. It doesn't matter whether we have 100,000 signatures or not. It is important what we propose to people, our programme and alternative,” Liabedzka said.

The politician noted that his team would continue to participate in the electoral campaign even if he is not registered as a presidential candidate. “We have the decision of the political council. My name won't appear in the ballot paper in any case. The only thing we lose is an opportunity to appear on state-owned TV. But if we record our speeches and distribute them in social media, who says it won't attract more people than, perhaps, a little stupid shows on Belarusian television?” Liabedzka says.

He admits that not all members of his initiative team were working effectively: “Like many others, we worked hard to attract many people to our initiative team. We understand now that only several hundreds worked, but these are the people with whom we will cooperate further. Yes, quality of people in our initiative group is different, but we understand now in which regions we have volunteers and on what we can count.”

Liabedzka said he would continue to organise pickets. “Article 45 of the Electoral Code says any citizen or political party can campaign for or against candidates, programmes and so on,” he said. According to the politician, if the authorities use repression, it will allow “collecting proofs that the elections are neither free nor fair.”