Viktar Babaryka’s return and the limits of managerial politics

In 2020, one of the reasons I supported Viktar Babaryka was precisely that he came into politics from business. But where, in Belarus at that time, were professional politicians supposed to come from? The country had not experienced genuinely competitive public politics for decades. Political parties played only a marginal role, parliament had limited independence, and no new political party had been registered since 2000 despite repeated attempts. There was no functioning political environment in which politicians could build careers through elections, learn to negotiate, form coalitions, make compromises and take responsibility for decisions. Political competence had very few institutional spaces in which it could be accumulated, tested and demonstrated over time. Voters therefore had little choice but to look for other biographical signs that a person could govern, make decisions and work with people and resources. After more than two decades of authoritarian rule, institutional arbitrariness, chronic unprofessionalism, and deep disrespect for citizens, a successful manager seemed almost like an answer in itself: rational, calm, modern and results oriented. Babaryka appeared capable of analysing problems, finding resources and building functioning processes. He also had another quality that mattered to many Belarusians at the time: as the head of Belgazprombank and a patron of Belarusian culture, he appeared to represent not only competence but also a different public style, strikingly unlike the aggressive and paternalistic language of Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s political system. Six years later, listening to Babaryka again, I still recognize many of the same qualities. What has changed more, perhaps, is my own understanding of politics and of what I expect from a political leader after everything that has happened to Belarus since 2020.

This is why his return interests me not simply as the return of one of the major political figures of 2020, but as an opportunity to ask a broader question: can politics be evaluated by the same logic that we use to assess a business or a project? Babaryka has repeatedly asked what the Belarusian democratic forces have actually done over the past six years, what benefits they have brought to Belarusians, what added value they have created, and why people inside the country should continue to see them as politically relevant. These are legitimate questions, and I think they need to be asked. Six years of work, even under extraordinary pressure, cannot in themselves serve as proof of effectiveness, while international recognition cannot be a substitute for political legitimacy within Belarusian society. It is possible and necessary to discuss failed decisions, unsuccessful projects, problems of representation, transparency and trust. My difficulty begins elsewhere: with the question of what exactly we are prepared to recognize as a political result.

The limits of managerial logic

Babaryka’s public language is remarkably consistent: effectiveness, key performance indicators (KPIs), resources, criteria, added value, solved problems. If there are one hundred problems, solve one and then another; if there are projects, establish criteria and determine which deserve support; if there are political structures, ask what value they have created and whether the resources invested in them have produced a measurable outcome. For a banker or the head of a large organization, this is a perfectly understandable and useful logic, and Belarusian politics certainly does not suffer from an excess of professional management. Yet politics begins precisely where managerial logic becomes insufficient, as political actors rarely agree in advance on the goals, on the criteria of success, or even on what the desirable future should look like. Different groups have different interests, values and visions, while outcomes depend not only on the quality of management but also on the distribution of power, the actions of other political actors, and circumstances that cannot be controlled.

If the main KPI of the Belarusian democratic movement since 2020 is regime change, then the conclusion is simple: it has not achieved its principal goal. Lukashenka remains in power and politically motivated repression continues, while a large part of Belarusian civil society now operates from abroad, where exiled organizations remain closely connected with democratic political structures.

But this is also an extremely narrow way of describing what has happened over the past six years. Independent media continued to provide Belarusian audiences with information that the state sought to suppress; human rights organizations continued documenting repression and supporting people affected by it; educational, cultural and research initiatives survived or were rebuilt abroad; organizations preserved networks, expertise and institutional memory; and Belarus did not disappear from the international agenda. None of this means that the work was necessarily done well. It can and should be evaluated critically, including questions about whether resources were wasted, whether institutions became closed, whether representation weakened, and whether more could have been achieved. But before asking whether this work was effective, we first need to recognize that it was work.

Scholars of technology and infrastructure have drawn attention to maintenance work — the often overlooked labour required not to create something new, but to keep existing systems functioning over time. We tend to recognize achievement more easily when it produces something new and visible: a house that has been built, a company that has been founded, a project that has been launched, a problem that has been solved. Maintenance is less visible because its result is often simply the fact that something continues to exist. A simple analogy can be found in domestic labour: one cannot cook an excellent dinner once and conclude that the problem of feeding a family has been solved; the work has to be done again tomorrow, next week and next year. Paradoxically, the better such work is performed, the more quickly its results begin to look like the natural state of things rather than an achievement requiring continuous effort.

A significant part of the work of the Belarusian democratic community after 2020 possesses exactly this character. Again and again, political and civic actors have had to re-introduce Belarus in conversations with international partners; remind them about political prisoners; explain why the Belarusian regime should not simply be equated with Belarusian society; maintain connections between organizations; preserve political representation; search for resources for independent media, education, culture and civil society; survive another crisis or internal conflict; and then continue working. There is almost never a moment when one can put a check mark next to such tasks and declare them completed, which is precisely why this work so easily becomes invisible. If Belarus remains present in international discussions, if independent media and human rights organizations still function, if a democratic community still exists after years of repression and displacement, all of this can gradually turn into background noise and be erased by a single question: “So what have you actually done?”

There is also a methodological problem: we do not know the counterfactual. We cannot observe what Belarus’s democratic community would look like in 2026 if nobody had spent six years maintaining these institutions, networks and relationships. We do not know which organizations would have disappeared, which international contacts would have been lost, how much expertise would have dissolved, or how quickly Belarus might have become reduced to the regime alone on the international stage. Preservation is difficult to present as an achievement because it cannot be photographed at an opening ceremony and because the thing being preserved already existed. At the same time, recognizing maintenance as a political result does not mean treating it as automatically effective: institutions can be maintained badly, networks can become closed, resources can be misallocated, and political representation can lose contact with the people it claims to represent. The concept simply broadens the category of what should count as political work before we begin judging how well that work was done.

Political capital and unequal time

Babaryka’s own trajectory introduces another difficulty into the discussion of effectiveness: political actors have not spent the years since 2020 under comparable conditions, and their political capital has therefore been accumulated and depleted in very different ways. Babaryka entered the presidential campaign in May 2020 and was arrested just over five weeks later. In that short period he became one of the main focal points for public mobilization, while his initiative group reported collecting almost 435,000 signatures. For many people, he came to embody the possibility of a credible alternative to Lukashenka. Then followed more than five years of imprisonment and an enormous personal price, which in a certain sense he continues to pay while his son remains behind bars.

Yet precisely this trajectory created an unusual political asymmetry. Babaryka’s public image was effectively frozen close to the point of its greatest ascent. He did not have time to make an unpopular decision, appoint the wrong person, enter a conflict with allies, build difficult coalitions, or accept compromises that disappointed supporters. This was not because he proved better at avoiding political mistakes; he was deprived of the possibility to make them. Others, meanwhile, remained in the political field and inevitably spent political capital through real action: they made decisions, created institutions, competed for resources, negotiated with foreign governments, entered conflicts, responded to crises, and accumulated both achievements and failures. Babaryka’s political capital, by contrast, remained to a significant degree preserved, while imprisonment added an enormous moral dimension to it. None of this diminishes what he endured, but it matters when someone returning with substantial symbolic authority begins evaluating the effectiveness of those who spent the intervening years making real political choices.

This is why Babaryka’s current public position is particularly interesting to me. A person whose experience of open political activity was extremely brief, but who has considerable symbolic and moral capital, returns to the public field and assumes the position of someone assessing those who remained in it. In this sense, he sometimes appears less like a politician than like an auditor of politics: he asks about outcomes, impact, resources, criteria, value and why citizens should choose one actor rather than another. This can be a useful role, as political structures do need scrutiny and accountability. However, an auditor and a political leader are not the same thing.

The point is not to ask Babaryka what he “achieved” during more than five years in prison. Such a question would be both meaningless and cruel, nor is there any reason to transfer responsibility for repression from those who exercise it to those who suffered from it. The more difficult issue is political responsibility of a different kind: the relationship between a leader and the people who once invested their hopes in him. In 2020, hundreds of thousands of Belarusians placed expectations in Babaryka’s campaign, joined political mobilization and accepted personal risks. If he now invites others to account for the period between 2020 and 2026, his own place in that history also deserves reflection — not only as a victim who paid an enormous price, but as one of the political leaders around whom that historical moment was organized.

This is also why I find his current distance from formal politics revealing. Babaryka has distanced himself from a formal political role within the existing democratic structures. His “Belarus Network” civic project is presented not as another political structure but as an instrument for connecting existing initiatives, projects and people. Such a role may suit him well and may prove highly useful. Building networks, supporting projects and bringing managerial competence into a fragmented community are not secondary tasks. But this is still different from political leadership, as a political leader does not only diagnose weaknesses in an existing field or identify projects that deserve support. Leadership also means entering that field, proposing priorities, persuading people, looking for allies, making choices and being prepared to say: I take responsibility for this decision.

What political leadership requires

This brings me back to “Babaryka the manager” whom I liked so much in 2020. I do not think managerial competence has become less important to Belarusian politics. On the contrary, Belarus badly needs people capable of working responsibly with resources, building institutions, organizing processes and achieving measurable results. What I understand much better now are the limits of this model. Political problems do not arise only because somebody has organized a process badly. They are rooted in power, inequality, conflicts of interests and values, historical memory, identity, violence and responsibility. Politics is therefore not only a question of how to use resources most efficiently, but also of what those resources are being used for, with whom, according to which values, and in the name of what kind of future.

There is a paradox here that perhaps demonstrates the limits of the language of “added value” better than anything else. In 2020, I myself believed in Babaryka, but he did not first present me with a set of political KPIs or prove what measurable added value he had already created for me as a voter. I believed in him because, at a particular moment, he came to embody the possibility of a different Belarus. Competence was certainly part of that appeal, but it was not the whole of it. It was also about trust, hope, dignity, identity and an image of the future. This is why the question “Why should people choose you?” seems to me ultimately more political than the question “What added value have you created?” Citizens do not choose political leaders in the same way that clients select the most efficient service provider. They may also follow someone because that person is capable of naming a problem, articulating a future, creating a sense of a collective “we” and persuading people that they can reach that future together.

I do not yet know what political role Viktar Babaryka will ultimately choose, particularly because he himself does not currently define that role as political. Belarus Network may turn out to be the most natural continuation of his strengths: building infrastructure, connecting people and resources, helping projects and bringing managerial expertise into an environment where such expertise is badly needed. This could be genuinely valuable. But it is a different role from the one many Belarusians imagined for him in 2020. Babaryka then represented the promise of political leadership. Babaryka in 2026 is so far offering something closer to competent mediation, infrastructure and management.

Perhaps the most interesting thing for me in this story is therefore not how much Viktar Babaryka has changed over these six years, but how much my own understanding of political leadership has changed. In 2020, after more than a quarter of a century of Lukashenka’s rule, it seemed almost sufficient that a rational and modern manager might replace him. After everything that followed, that is no longer enough for me. I still want political leaders to know how to make things work, but I also want to understand what kind of Belarus they propose to build, with whom, for what purpose, and what responsibility they are prepared to assume for that choice.

Iryna Sidorskaya is a Belarusian media and communication researcher based in Warsaw. She holds a Doctor of Science degree in Communication and is the founder of Fundacja Kantrapunkt, an analytical and research platform.