Western leaders and the Belarusian opposition have denounced Alexander Lukashenko’s victory in Sunday’s stage-managed election, which will extend his ruthless three-decade grip on the country for another six years.
The German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, called the vote a “bitter day for all those who long for freedom and democracy”.
The Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, expressed mock surprise that “only” 87.6% of the electorate appeared to have backed Lukashenko. “Will the rest fit inside the prisons?” he wrote on X, referring to Lukashenko’s repressive rule under which thousands of Belarusians have been jailed.
But the authoritarian leader received praise from his closest ally, Vladimir Putin, who congratulated him on Monday for achieving a “confident victory”.
The country’s central election commission announced on Sunday evening that preliminary results showed Lukashenko, 70, securing nearly 87% of the presidential vote, granting him a seventh term, while the runner-up received only 3%.
Lukashenko’s four challengers, all loyal to him and running merely to lend an air of legitimacy to the vote, praised the incumbent throughout the campaign.
Lukashenko, known as “Europe’s last dictator” – a nickname he embraces – has been in power since 1994 and has ruled the country of 9 million people with an iron hand.
The exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya denounced the vote as a “farce”. “What in the democratic world you call elections has nothing in common with this event in Belarus,” Tsikhanouskaya said.
Tsikhanouskaya, whose husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, has been held incommunicado for almost a year, had urged voters to cross off everyone on the ballot. She called on world leaders not to recognise the result from a country “where all independent media and opposition parties have been destroyed and prisons are filled by political prisoners”.
The election committee said 3.6% of voters followed Tsikhanouskaya’s advice and voted against all candidates.
Lukashenko, who previously maintained a delicate balance between the EU and Moscow, became increasingly reliant on Russia both economically and politically after the contested 2020 presidential election, marred by allegations of fraud and unprecedented protests that brought hundreds of thousands of Belarusians on to the streets.
The violent crackdown by Lukashenko’s security forces that followed turned him into a pariah in the west, pushing him closer to Moscow and in effect transforming Minsk into a vassal state of Russia – an alliance that proved crucial for Putin when Belarus became a launch point for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Human rights groups estimate more than 500,000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020 – mostly to Poland and Lithuania – out of a population of 9 million.
Anti-Lukashenko demonstrations took place in cities across Europe amid the election, with people carrying the white-red-white traditional Belarusian flag – abolished by Lukashenko in 1995 – at events in different cities. They were not able to cast ballots, with Belarus having scrapped voting from abroad.
During a rambling four-hour press conference after he cast his ballot on Sunday, Lukashenko threatened to punish relatives in Belarus of those participating in protests abroad. “You’re just putting your people at risk,” Lukashenko said, addressing the opposition in exile. “And as for you, we will deal with you.”
At the same conference, Lukashenko said he would not rule out running again for president in 2030.
He said he “did not give a damn” about western condemnation though observers believe the Belarusian leader has been making careful overtures towards the west in recent months, widely seen as an effort to get relief from sanctions.
Since July, Lukashenko has granted rare pardons to 250 political prisoners, a move some view as an attempt by him to ease Belarus’s international isolation.
He has also allowed limited prison access to two of the most prominent opposition figures inside the country, Maria Kalesnikava and Viktor Babariko, who had been isolated for almost two years with no contact with the outside world.
With Donald Trump back in power in the US and growing anticipation of ceasefire talks over Ukraine, Lukashenko appeared to be manoeuvring to position himself ahead of potential geopolitical shifts across the continent, said Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank.
“Lukashenko wouldn’t want his regime to be left out if some sort of detente starts in the region,” Shraibman said.
On Sunday, Lukashenko predicted that “there will be some kind of resolution this year” to the war in Ukraine. “We will see light at the end of the tunnel this year,” he said.
Article by:Source: Pjotr Sauer
