‘I’ll keep my word’. Thousands gather at Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s rally in Homiel
On July 26, presidential candidate Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, along with her associates Veranika Tsapkala and Maryia Kalesnikava, visited Zhlobin, Rechytsa and Homiel.
On Sunday evening, around 10,000 people showed up at Tsikhanovskaya’s campaign event in Homiel, the second-largest Belarusian city. Over the recent years, not a single rally held in the city had been so great in numbers. The picket started at 8 pm in front of the entrance to the Centre for Inclusive Culture in Yubileynaya street.
Delivering her speech, the candidate told about her husband, well-known blogger Syarhei Tsikhanouski, who is now being kept in a pretrial detention facility in Minsk ‘for his civic-mindedness’. The presidential hopeful stressed that Homiel was Syarhei Tsikhanouski’s hometown.
According to her, when removing three Lukashenka’s opponents (Syarhei Tsikhanouski, Viktar Babaryka and Valery Tsapkala) from the election race, the authorities did not take into account the fact that ‘behind every strong man there is a strong woman’.
Tsikhanouskaya promises that if she becomes President, the above-mentioned might-have-been rivals will be able to run in a fair election which will be held six months after Svyatlana’s contemplated victory.
“I am not a politician <…> I am going to perform my mission and quietly step aside. And Belarus will be ruled by a new, decent president,” she said.
The 2020 presidential election is scheduled for August, 9. The representatives of the united headquarters of Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Viktar Babaryka and Valery Tsapkala are set to continue staging pre-election pickets across the country.
