‘Constitution of the New Belarus’ as a Project of Post-Authoritarian Transformation and Decolonisation

Abstract

In mid-2022, the Belarusian democratic opposition presented a draft constitution for the ‘new Belarus’, which would come into force after the collapse of President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. The content of the draft constitution is not simply a return to the original text of Belarus’s Constitution of 1994. This is a completely new document intended to protect the nation against a return of authoritarianism. Therefore, the goals of this article are twofold: to give a brief overview of the process of the authoritarianisation of Belarus in the constitutional dimension in the years 1994–2022, and to analyse the content of the draft constitution of the ‘new Belarus’ from the perspective of deauthoritarianisation and decolonisation, recently presented by William Partlett and Herbert Küpper. The following study reveals that the postauthoritarian reverse planned by the draft constitution for the ‘new Belarus’ should include foremostly state-building processes and strengthening parliamentarism. The conclusion is that this project has a number of deauthoritarian features that significantly limit the competences of the head of state, establishing a parliamentary model of government.