President Alexander Lukashenko’s smiling face peeked out from campaign posters in Belarus on Sunday as the country held an orchestrated election to effectively give the 70-year-old autocrat another term beyond his three decades in power.
“Needed!” The posters proclaim beneath a photo of Lukashenko, his hands clasped together. The phrase is what groups of voters have responded to in campaign videos after they were reportedly asked whether they should serve again.
But his opponents, many of whom are imprisoned or exiled abroad by his relentless crackdown on dissent and free speech, would not agree. They call the election a sham – similar to the last one in 2020, which sparked months of protests unprecedented in the history of the country of 9 million people.
The crackdown resulted in more than 65,000 arrests and thousands made, drawing condemnation and sanctions from the West.
His iron fist rule since 1994 – Lukashenko took office two years after the Soviet Union’s demise – earned him the nickname of “Europe’s Last Dictator” and relied on subsidies and political support from close ally Russia.
He let Moscow invade its territory into Ukraine in 2022 and even hosted some of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons, but he still campaigned on the slogan “peace and security” and argued that he had saved Belarus from war.
“It is better to have a dictatorship like Belarus than a democracy like Ukraine,” Lukashenko said with his characteristic bluntness.
Fear a repeat of election unrest
His reliance on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support—himself for a quarter of a century—helped him survive the 2020 protests.
Observers believe that Lukashenko was repeating those mass demonstrations over economic problems and the fighting in Ukraine, timing the vote in January when few would want to fill the streets again, rather than in August. He only faces token opposition.
“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 voting looks more like a special operation to retain power than an election,” the Belarusian said political analyst Valery Karbalevich.
Lukashenko repeatedly stated that he was not clinging to power and would “quietly and calmly hand it over to the new generation.”
His 20-year-old son Nikolai traveled around 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 has been active despite the obvious health problems, and it means he still has a lot of energy,” Karbalevich said. “The successor problem only becomes relevant when a leader prepares to step down. But Lukasenko won’t go. “
Top political opponents imprisoned or banished
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, authorities have sought to uproot dissent by arresting hundreds in raids targeting relatives and friends of political prisoners and people participating in online activities from apartment blocks in various cities.
Authorities have detained 188 people in the last month alone, Viasna said. Activists and those who donated money to opposition groups were summoned by police and forced to sign papers saying they had been warned against taking part in non-animal demonstrations, Rights Advocates said.
Lukashenko’s four challengers on the ballot are all steadfast to him and praise his rule.
“I do not stand against the race against the race, but together with Lukashenko and am ready to serve as his vanguard,” said Sergei Syrankov, candidate of the Communist Party, which supports the criminalization of LGBTQ+ activities and the reconstruction of monuments to the Soviet leader Josef Stalin favored.
Candidate Alexander Khizhnyak, head of the Republican Labor and Justice Party, headed a constituency in Minsk in 2020 and vowed to prevent a “recurrence of disruption.”
Oleg Gaidukevich, head of the liberal Democratic Party, endorsed Lukashenko in 2020 and called on fellow candidates to “slander Lukashenko’s enemies.”
The fourth challenger, Hanna Kanapatskaya, actually received 1.7% of the vote in 2020 and says she is the “only democratic alternative to Lukashenko,” promising to take credit for freeing political prisoners but rallying supporters against “excessive Initiative” to warn.
Opposition leader calls election ‘a senseless farce’
Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled to Belarus after the president’s ouster in 2020, told the Associated Press that Sunday’s election was “a senseless farce, a Lukashenko ritual.”
Voters should cross off everyone on the ballot and world leaders should not recognize the result of a country “where all independent media and opposition parties are destroyed and filled with political prisoners.”
“The repression has become even more brutal than this vote without an election, but Lukashenko meets as if hundreds of thousands of people are still standing in front of his palace,” she said.
The European Parliament on Wednesday called on the European Union to reject the results of the election.
Reporters from Media Freedom Watchdog Without Borders filed a complaint against Lukashenko over his crackdown on free speech, arresting 397 journalists since 2020. It is said that 43 are in prison.
Fears of voting excursions
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, which began on Tuesday, has created fertile ground for irregularities as polling boxes are left unguarded until the final day of voting, the opposition said. More than 27% of voters cast ballots in three days of early voting, officials said.
Polling stations have removed curtains from voting boxes and voters are banned from photographing their ballots – a response to the opposition’s call in 2020 for voters to take such images to make it harder for authorities to rig the vote.
The police carried out large-scale exercises before the election. In an Interior Ministry video, Helm police showed rioters hitting their shields with truncheons to prepare to disperse a protest. Another showed an officer arresting a man posing as a voter and twisting his arm next to a ballot.
Belarus initially refused to allow observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to monitor previous elections. It changed course this month and invited the OSCE – when it was already too slow to organize a monitoring mission.
Increasing dependence on Russia
Lukashenko’s support for the war in Ukraine has led to the breaking of Belarus’s ties with the United States and the European Union and ended his gamesmanship to operate the West to try to win more subsidies from the Kremlin.
“Until 2020, Lukashenko was able to maneuver and play against Western Russia, but now, when Belarus’ status is close to that of Russia’s satellite,” said Artyom Shraybman, a Belarus expert at the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Center.
After the election, Lukashenko could try to ease his total dependence on Russia by looking west again, he predicted.
“Lukashenko’s interim goal 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.
