MINSK – Reclusive Moscow-allied Belarus will hold a presidential election on January 26, with President Alexander Lukashenko poised to secure an unchallenged victory for a seventh term, extending his three-decade authoritarian rule.
Lukashenko, a 70-year-old former collective farm boss, has been in power since 1994. This will be Minsk’s first presidential vote since he suppressed mass protests against his rule in 2020 and allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to invade Ukraine in 2022.
The 2020 presidential election in Belarus ended with nationwide protests, with the opposition and the West accusing Lukashenko of rigging the vote. The regime responded with a massive crackdown: over 1,000 people remain imprisoned, and tens of thousands have fled the country. All of Lukashenko’s political opponents are either in prison, some held incommunicado, or in exile.
In a speech to supporters on January 24, Lukashenko referred to the 2020 protests as “like a vaccine” to prevent them from happening again. “All our opponents and enemies should understand: do not hope, we will never repeat what we had in 2020,” he declared during a carefully choreographed ceremony in Minsk.
Most people in Belarus have only distant memories of life before Lukashenko, who was 39 when he won the first national election in Belarus since it gained independence from the Soviet Union. Criticism of the strongman is banned in Belarus, and most people AFP spoke to in Minsk and other towns voiced support for him, though they were fearful of giving their surnames.
The other candidates running against Lukashenko have been picked to give the election an air of democracy, but few know who they are. “I will vote for Lukashenko because things have improved since he became president (in 1994),” said 42-year-old farmer Alexei in the tiny village of Gubichi in southeastern Belarus. He earns around 300 euros a month selling milk but, like many in Belarus, is worried about the war in neighboring Ukraine.
In 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine from several directions, including from Belarus. The following year, Russia sent tactical nuclear weapons to the country, which borders NATO. Alexei expressed his wish “for there not to be a war.”
The regime’s narrative has been that Lukashenko guaranteed peace and order in Belarus, accusing 2020 street protest leaders of sowing chaos. The UN estimates that some 300,000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020, mostly to Poland and Lithuania, out of a population of nine million. They will not be able to vote, as Belarus has scrapped voting abroad.
Exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya denounced the vote as a “farce” in an early January interview with AFP. Her husband, Sergei Tikhanovsky, has been held incommunicado for almost a year. She urged dissidents to prepare for an opportunity to change their country but conceded “it was not the moment.”
In the run-up to the election, the Lukashenko regime pardoned around 200 political prisoners. However, former prisoners say those released are under the close watch of security services and are unable to lead normal lives. Nobel Prize winner Ales Bialiatski is among those still imprisoned in Belarus.
While Lukashenko once carefully balanced his relations between the EU and Moscow, since 2020 he has become politically and economically reliant on Russia. EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas called the election a “sham” on January 25, stating that “Lukashenko doesn’t have any legitimacy.”
Known as “Europe’s last dictator,” a nickname he embraces, Lukashenko’s Belarus has retained much of the Soviet Union’s traditions and infrastructure. Unlike in Russia, the KGB has kept its haunting name, and Belarus still applies the death penalty. The country’s economy is largely state-planned, and Lukashenko scrapped Belarus’s white-red-white flag in the 1990s, which has since become the symbol of the opposition.
Lukashenko prides himself on having kept the country’s Soviet-era industries and agricultural enterprises in state hands. In his speech on January 24, he spoke about the “pyatiletka” (Five Year Plan), an economic term used in the Soviet Union.