Belarusians will vote in a presidential election on Sunday as President Alexander Lukashenko seeks a seventh mandate to rule.
For the past 30 years, the 70-year-old Lukashenko, described by many analysts as “Europe’s last dictator,” has ruled the country with an iron fist, destroying all opposition and voices against him.
The president, who has not campaigned this run, told factory workers last week: “To be honest, I don’t follow him. I just don’t have time for it. “
But mass protests broke out after the last election in 2020, when the leader was declared the winner despite reports of grassroots anger against him. The opposition and the West claimed his victory was fraudulent and stolen by leading candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who was forced to flee the country.
Now, with his political opponents either jailed or exiled, Lukashenko is widely believed to be all but guaranteed on Sunday.
The election was originally scheduled for August, but was moved to the depths of winter. There was a reason that Belarusian political analyst Valery Karbalevich suggested to the Associated Press news agency: “There will be no mass protests in the January freeze.”
Here’s what you need to know about the choice:
When do ballots open?
At 8am (05:00 GMT), polls opened across the country and will remain open until 8pm (17:00 GMT).
Belarus operates under a simple majority system in which citizens vote for the head of state and legislature every five years.
Belarusians aged 18 and over will be able to take part.
Results are expected by February 5th and a second round will be held on February 12th if necessary.
How many people are expected to vote?
State news agency Belta reported Friday that voter turnout was 27.15 percent after three days of early voting.
Last week it said that in an opinion poll conducted in December that interviewed 1,500 people, 85.5 percent of registered voters said they would vote in the upcoming election.
According to Statistica, a data mining platform, approximately 84 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in the presidential election in August 2020.
It added that the capital, Minsk, recorded the lowest voter turnout at “over 66 percent.”
Overseas Belarusians, however, will only be able to vote in the election by returning to the country and casting a ballot at a regional polling station.
Who is running against Lukashenko?
According to the country’s Central Election Commission (CEC), four candidates have been registered for the leadership.
The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Oleg Gaidukevich, announced his candidacy in October, telling the first news channel that there must be “healthy competition, discussion.”
Sergei Sirankov, first secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, is also on the ballot.
Anna Kanapatskaya, a former lawmaker who contested the 2020 presidential election, is also running. and Alexander Khizhnyak, leader of the Republican Labor Party, is the fourth candidate.
However, Tatsiana Chulitskaya, a Belarusian academic at Vilnius University in Lithuania, told Reuters that no candidate criticized Lukashenko during their campaign.
“These are not candidates in the normal meaning of that word. You only play in this campaign. “You are not competing with Lukashenko,” she said in a telephone interview.
What happened in 2020?
After the August elections, the CEC announced that Lukashenko had been re-elected, winning 80.1 percent of the vote, clinching his victory over Tsikhanouskaya.
However, allegations of voter fraud spread like wildfire after some argued that the number of polling stations did not add up to the CEC’s official count, leading to opposition groups and Western governments accusing Lukasenko of stealing the election.
Largely peaceful mass protests broke out in Minsk over the election results, demanding that Lukashenko resign.
However, protesters have been met with intense policing and mass arrests, with Belarusian human rights group Viasna reporting this week that more than 3,270 people were convicted for taking part in the 2020 protests.
Additionally, the group noted that there are more than 1,200 political prisoners in the country. Lukashenko released 23 political prisoners last week in what state media described as humanitarian gestures that appeared to coincide with the final days before the election.
Did the election receive a backlash?
Tsikhanouskaya called on the West on X to reject the “illegitimate” elections.
She told BBC News that the election was a “sham” and added: “This is a military-style operation. A performance staged by the regime to cling to power. “
But Tsikhanouskaya urged Belarusians not to protest
At the same time, the European Parliament passed a resolution on Wednesday to reject the election results.
“While the MEPS read their unrecognized recognition of Mr. Lukashenko as president and their position that the entire Belarusian regime is illegitimate.
Last week, former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the election could not be free or fair in an “environment where censorship is pervasive, and independent media no longer exists.”
He added that the US condemned the Belarusian government’s attempts to “legitimize” the election.
