A descent from the sublime to the ridiculous is quick: a parrot was registered as a candidate for taking part in local elections in Mazurski election district No 19 in Homel.
Parrot Yasha is likely to run the parliamentary elections next year. If the bird wins a deputy’s seat, it will get to grips, his owner Kastus Zhukouski, an activist from Homel, says.
The state allocates a lot of money from state budget to keep an MP: each is well-paid, has a car and an apartment, etc. ‘Yasha doesn’t need these things, but it can perform the same functions. It can press a button; monkeys can press a button; everyone can press buttons,’ Mr Zhukouski stresses.
As an experiment, Mr Zhukouski took a copy of his passport and pasted there a photo of Yasha with help of Photoshop.
{movie}Parrot Yasha speaks Belarusian and dreams of a deputy’s career (English subs)|right|14330{/movie}
On January 16, 2014 Kastus Zhukouski filed documents to register an initiative group for nominating Yasha. There might have been a photo of the parrot in a copy of a candidate’s passport Mr Zhukouski had on him but a secretary of Mazurau election commission No 19 did receive the documents.
As soon as the secretary registered the papers of parrot Yakau (Yasha) Zhukouski the activist took them back explaining that he had disordered them.
‘My parrot has always dreamt of a deputy’s carreer and even learnt to pronounce ‘Yarmoshyna’ [the irreplaceable head of the Central Election Committee suspected of election fraud], ‘Where is the money?’, ‘I want to be an MP’. A deputy does not need to know more. His election program is ‘Yasha is good,’ Mr Zhukouski says.
According to him, the secretary was not emparrased by the fact that there was a photo of a parrot in the copy: ‘If you have a copy of a passport, you can draw a pig there which might be later registered’.
