Belarusian President Alexander G. Lukashenko, Europe's longest-serving leader, was dismissed as a sham whose ousted enemy aimed to tighten an authoritarian grip on the former Soviet republic, a contest And on Sunday, he won his seventh election. , Russia's closest ally.
“Do not use the word election to explain this travesty,” said Svetlana, an opposition leader who fled Belarus after a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests against the country's former presidential vote and electoral fraud in 2020. – Tikhanovskaya said. “It is a staged performance by Lukashenko to persist to power at all costs.”
Official results released early on Monday gave Mr Lukashenko yet another landslide victory, awarding him 86.82% of the vote. This is more than the 81% he claimed in the contested 2020 election. As a result, his opponents and Western governments dismissed it as incredibly high, which sparked huge street protests.
With domestic voices of dissent silenced by Lukashenko's vast security apparatus, there is little chance of protests this time.
Unlike in 2020, when Mr. Tikhanovskaya was allowed to run against Mr. Lukashenko and declared himself the winner, Sunday's election will be a tightly controlled herd featuring only candidates loyal to the president. It was a normal event. No one had expressed a desire to actually overthrow Mr. Lukashenko, who ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.
Tikhanovskaya, who has been abroad since 2020, did not take part in Sunday's election and was instead in Warsaw, mocking her efforts and She claimed that President Trump had cut off funding to her opposition campaign while she was in exile. He appeared to be referring to an executive order last week that halted virtually all foreign aid for a 90-day reassessment period.
The three candidates running against Mr Lukashenko each received around 2% or less of the vote, according to official results reported by state news agency Belta. The fourth Communist Party leader, Sergei Silankov, was listed as having received 3.2%.
During last week's televised election debate, in which the president did not participate, Shirankov said he wanted to be “honest” and added: “Everyone in this studio knows that Aleksandr Lukashenko will win.”
The result was a foregone conclusion, as all of Lukashenko's prominent opponents are enemies in prison or in exile, and Belarusian media are all rooting for the incumbent. But what was still important to a president who wants to show his country, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, that the chaos of 2020 was tamed.
In a statement on Sunday, European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Callas described the election as a “sham” that was “neither free nor fair.”
But observers of foreign elections, drawn from far-right parties in Africa, former Soviet republics and Europe like Alternative in Germany, hailed the vote as a victory for democracy and criticized tart criticism of the election by European authorities and the European Parliament. I blamed it. “They say there is a dictatorship here, but I don't think so – I don't think so – the reality in Belarus is completely different,” said an observer representing Bulgaria's fringe nationalist party. One Krusty Vlachev told the Belarusian state news agency. “People are calm and communicate easily. In Europe, this is not the case at all,” he added.
The election was indeed quiet, so Mr. Lukashenko barely bothered campaigning, and he was unable to engage in debates with rival candidates with four state-elected candidates or to hold rallies. I said there wasn't. But in a nod to conventional politics, last week he signed an order to raise pensions by 10% starting February 1st.
A recent survey of public opinion in Belarus by the British research group Chatham House shows widespread dissatisfaction with the economy. Economic sanctions imposed on the country for its support for Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Only 11% of respondents were satisfied with the economy, while only 32% said they supported Russian aggression.
Lukashenko's main appeal, according to the survey, is his “favorable image” as a “politician striving to prevent Belarus from becoming involved in a military conflict after Russia's invasion of Ukraine.”
Russian troops had been using Belarus as a stage for their first abortions as they headed to Kiev in early 2022, but Lukashenko resisted pressure from Moscow to direct Belarusian troops to join the fight against Ukraine. I have been dispatched.
After voting on Sunday in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Lukashenko predicted that “there will be some kind of resolution this year” to the conflict, adding that President Trump is “not an idiot, not a fool,” recognizing that Belarus and “You cannot push us away” in reference to Russia. “This year we will see light at the end of the tunnel,” he said of the war.
All of his nominal rivals in Sunday's vote offered no open dissent, retaining his moniker as “Europe's last dictator,” which was humiliated by U.S. Secretary of State Conde The Rice in 2005. He avoided criticism of Mr. Lukashenko, which he accepted.
While happy to provoke the West, especially neighboring Poland, and display loyalty to Moscow, Lukashenko has in recent months improved frosty relations with Western capitals by releasing political prisoners. It shows a desire to.
The process is widely seen as an effort to receive relief from Western sanctions, including five people jailed for “extremist crimes,” a blanket term Lukashenko has used to describe his criticism of the president. , followed on Friday when it pardoned 15 more prisoners. The names of those released were not made public.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio indicated in a social media post Sunday that he included a U.S. citizen, whom he identified as Anastasia Neufer, “brought under Joe Biden!” he said in the post. Rubio said that thanks to President Trump's guidance, Nufer was “unilaterally released.”
At a press conference in Minsk on Sunday, Mr Lukashenko denied that he was favorably inducing prisoners abroad to Calais, saying: “I don't care about the West.” He said his decision to free some people was “based on the principles of humanity.”
None of Mr Lukashenko's most prominent opponents, including Mr Tikhanovskaya's husband Sergei, have been released. The United States and the European Union have suspended sanctions.
In a sign that authorities are hoping for a more sympathetic hearing from the new Trump administration, Belarusian state media reported last week that the State Department removed a statement critical of Sunday's election following the inauguration ceremony in Washington. He reported that he was overjoyed. It was created by outgoing Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
Blinken's now-deleted statement condemned the Belarusian elections as a farce, saying, “The United States cannot assess elections as unreliable in an environment where censorship is omnipresent and independent media no longer exists.” We join many of our European allies in this assessment.”
