Gigin: Belarus should keep talking to Europe

The issue faced by the European countries is that their current political system is at odds with the societal demand, said Vadim Gigin, House of Representatives MP and General Director of the National Library, talking to Alfa Radio

The MP disagreed with the notion that as long as Europe remains under the external management from Washington, there’s no reason to talk to the European leaders, and we should instead wait and see which policies new US President Donald Trump is going to push.

“There is some truth to that, but we should keep our contacts with Europe all the same, keep appealing to its society, its elites, and its ruling class. We should monitor processes that are in play there,” he said

In Mr. Gigin’s opinion, the collective West’s current policies do not work for us, and that’s why it is important to make them aware where we stand.

“If they refuse to hear us the first time around, we should say it again and again, doing the same thing our opponents do when they work against us,” he explained.

A number of Western European countries are now in a political crisis, he said, citing Poland as an example.

“Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, has said a lot of things about Donald Trump in the past, calling him a Kremlin agent, Putin’s stooge, etc. When Trump came to power, though, he just called in sick. Europe is not fully aware of the winds that are blowing, that the population is turning right. American and Western opinion experts have made fools of themselves again. They don’t have the tools to reliably gauge the public opinion. President Aleksandr Lukashenko correctly predicted that Trump would win in 2016. And this time around, Trump won in a landslide that caught pollsters completely by surprise,” Mr. Gigin explained.