Belarus was considered the “last dictatorship in Europe” for former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (Georg W. Bush presidency). As the Le Monde newspaper writes today, this Eastern European country now risks being seen as that “village of the irreducible Gauls”, a bag of political resistance to social isolation measures that are rampant all over the world because of Covid-19.
According to the country’s official figures, the coronavirus infected only 152 Belarusians in a population of 9.5 million inhabitants (almost the equivalent of Portugal). The country’s President, Alexandre Loukachenko, refuses to order quarantine because he says that social isolation measures are “killing people”. More radical in the Covid-19 denial than the Brazilian Bolsonaro or the American Trump, the Belarusian Head of State calls the pandemic “psychosis”, as reported by the correspondent of the French newspaper in Moscow.
In Belarus everything remains happily open: restaurants, markets, shops. Citizens are free to move, to come and go to and from wherever they want. The football championship is the only one in the world that has not been suspended and the stadiums are full of fans. In such a way that in order to satisfy the appetite for the ball of its overgrown nationals, neighboring countries like Russia, Ukraine but even the most distant Israel have already acquired the broadcasting rights of the Belarusian championship.
