President Alexander Lukashenko’s smiling face stared out on campaign posters across Belarus on Sunday as the country held an orchestrated election that would virtually guarantee the 70-year-old autocrat another term in office on top of his three decades in power.
“Needed!” the posters proclaim under a photo of Lukashenko with his hands folded. Voter groups reacted to this sentence in campaign videos after they were allegedly asked whether they wanted him back in office.
But his opponents, many of whom are imprisoned or exiled abroad because of his relentless crackdown on dissent and free speech, would disagree. They call the election a sham election – similar to the last one in 2020, which sparked months of protests unprecedented in the history of the country of nine million people.
The crackdown resulted in more than 65,000 arrests and thousands were beaten, leading to condemnation and sanctions from the West.
His iron rule since 1994 – Lukashenko took office two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union – earned him the nickname “Europe’s last dictator”, relying on subsidies and political support from close ally Russia.
He let Moscow use its territory to invade Ukraine in 2022 and even hosted some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons, but continued to campaign on the “peace and security” slogan and argued that he had saved Belarus from becoming embroiled in war become.
“It is better to have a dictatorship like in Belarus than a democracy like Ukraine,” Lukashenko said in his characteristic bluntness.
For fear of a repeat of the election unrest
His reliance on the support of Russian President Vladimir Putin – himself in power for a quarter of a century – helped him survive the 2020 protests.
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Observers assume that, given the economic problems and fighting in Ukraine, Lukashenko feared a repeat of these mass demonstrations and therefore scheduled the vote not in August but in January, when few people wanted to take to the streets again. He only meets with symbolic resistance.
“The trauma of the 2020 protests was so deep that this time Lukashenko decided not to take any risks and chose the most reliable option when the vote looks more like a special operation to retain power than an election,” said Belarusian political analyst Valery Karbalevich .
Lukashenko repeatedly stated that he was not clinging to power and would “quietly hand it over to the new generation.”
His 20-year-old son Nikolai traveled the country, giving interviews, signing autographs and playing the piano at campaign events. His father did not mention his health, although he had difficulty walking and occasionally spoke in a hoarse voice.
“Lukashenko ran an active campaign despite the obvious health problems, and that means he still has a lot of energy,” Karbalevich said. “The question of succession only becomes relevant when a leader prepares to step down. But Lukashenko won’t go.”
Leading political opponents imprisoned or exiled
Leading opponents have fled abroad or been thrown into prison. The country holds nearly 1,300 political prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, founder of the Viasna Human Rights Center.
Since July, Lukashenko has pardoned more than 250 people described by activists as political prisoners. At the same time, however, authorities sought to uproot dissent by arresting hundreds in raids targeting relatives and friends of political prisoners, as well as anyone participating in online activities organized by apartment blocks in various cities.
Last month alone, authorities arrested 188 people, Viasna said. Activists and those who donated money to opposition groups were summoned by police and forced to sign papers warning them against taking part in unauthorized demonstrations, human rights activists said.
Lukashenko’s four challengers on the ballot are all loyal to him and praise his rule.
“I am running not against, but together with Lukashenko and am ready to serve as his vanguard,” said Communist Party candidate Sergei Syrankov, who supports criminalizing LGBTQ+ activities and rebuilding monuments to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin uses.
Candidate Alexander Chizhnyak, head of the Republican Party of Labor and Justice, led a constituency in Minsk in 2020 and vowed to prevent a “recurrence of unrest.”
Oleg Gaidukevich, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, endorsed Lukashenko in 2020 and called on his fellow candidates to “make Lukashenko’s enemies sick.”
The fourth challenger, Hanna Kanapatskaya, actually received 1.7 percent of the vote in 2020 and says she is the “only democratic alternative to Lukashenko.” She promises to work for the release of political prisoners, but warns her supporters against “excessive initiative.”
Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled Belarus under government pressure after challenging the president in 2020, told The Associated Press that Sunday’s election was “a senseless farce, a Lukashenko ritual.”
Voters should strike everyone on the ballot, she said, and world leaders should not recognize the result of a country “where all independent media and opposition parties have been destroyed and prisons are filled with political prisoners.”
“The repression has become even more brutal as this non-election vote approaches, but Lukashenko acts as if hundreds of thousands of people are still standing in front of his palace,” she said.
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The European Parliament called on the European Union on Wednesday to reject the election results.
Reporters Without Borders, the media freedom watchdog, filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court against Lukashenko over his crackdown on free expression, which has seen 397 journalists arrested since 2020. It said 43 were in prison.
Fear of election fraud
According to the Central Election Commission, there are 6.8 million eligible voters. However, around 500,000 people have left Belarus and cannot vote.
At home, early voting that began on Tuesday created fertile ground for irregularities as ballot boxes would remain unguarded until the final day of voting, the opposition said. More than 27 percent of voters cast ballots within three days of early voting, officials said.
Polling stations have removed curtains from ballot boxes and voters are banned from photographing their ballots – a response to the opposition’s 2020 call for voters to take such pictures to make it harder for authorities to vote to manipulate.
The police carried out large-scale exercises before the election. An Interior Ministry video showed helmeted riot police beating their shields with batons as they prepared to disperse a protest. In another case, an officer arrested a man who posed as a voter and twisted his arm near a ballot box.
Belarus initially refused to allow observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitored previous elections. This month it changed course and invited the OSCE – when it was already too late to organize a monitoring mission.
Increasing dependence on Russia
Lukashenko’s support for the war in Ukraine has led to Belarus’s severing of relations with the United States and the European Union, ending his game of using the West to get more subsidies from the Kremlin.
“Until 2020, Lukashenko was able to maneuver Russia and play it off against the West, but now that Belarus’ status is approaching that of a Russian satellite, this North Korean-style election ties the Belarusian leader even more closely to the Kremlin and shortens the leash,” he told Artyom Shraybman , a Belarus expert at the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Center.
After the election, Lukashenko could try to reduce his total dependence on Russia by trying to reach out to the West again, he predicted.
“Lukashenko’s preliminary aim is to use the election to confirm his legitimacy and try to overcome his isolation to at least start a conversation with the West about easing sanctions,” Shraybman said.
