Another would-be rival of Alyaksandr Lukashenka has come into the spotlight.
Andrey Ivanov, a native of Russia’s Tomsk and resident of Minsk, announced his intention to run in the 2020 presidential election in Belarus. The 52-year-old university teacher is a vocal supporter of Soviet ideals and the Russian World narrative. According to him, Belarus has been under occupation since 1991.
He delivered lectures in many cities and towns, telling local officials and ideologists about the NATO threat, praising Josef Stalin and blasting the West, the newspaper Nasha Niva reports. Andrey Ivanov has a letter of approval from the Youth Minister’ of the separatist- run Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine.
Ivanov is going to participate in the upcoming presidential race under the umbrella of ‘morality’ and ‘spirituality’.
However, given that Andrey Ivanov was born in a foreign country, the Belarusian Central Election Commission will hardly register him as a presidential candidate.
As reported earlier, the 2020 presidential election is scheduled for August, 9. Over the last five days, many people have profiled their presidential ambitions, including former MP Hanna Kanapatskaya, Belarusian hi-tech park founder Valery Tsapkala, banker Viktar Babaryka , popular vlogger Syarhei Tsikhanouski and others.
In late January, five Belarusian opposition parties agreed to nominate a single candidate for the 2020 presidential elections. Their representatives declared that the primaries would last until May and would also be conducted on the Internet. However, on May 10, a group of Belarusian opposition politicians said that the COVID-19 threat took the ‘full participation’ in the 2020 presidential campaign and electing a single candidate off the table.
