Belarusian President Alexander G. Lukashenko, Europe's longest-serving leader, on Sunday rejected a campaign that exile opponents dismissed as a charade aimed solely at consolidating authoritarian control over the former Soviet republic. Aiming for seven consecutive victories. , Russia's closest ally.
“The word election should not be used to describe this travesty,” said opposition leader Svetlana, who fled Belarus following the brutal crackdown on nationwide protests against the last presidential vote and election fraud in 2020.・Mr. Tikhanovskaya said. “It's Lukashenko's show of clinging to power at all costs.”
Official results announced early Monday showed Mr. Lukashenko winning in another landslide with 86.82% of the vote. That's even higher than the 81 percent he claimed in the contested 2020 election — a result his opponents and Western governments dismissed as impossibly high and prompted massive street protests. sparked activity.
Domestic dissent has been silenced by Lukashenko's extensive security apparatus, and there is little chance of protests this time around.
Unlike 2020, when Ms. Tikhanovskaya was allowed to run against Mr. Lukashenko and declared herself the winner, Sunday's election was a tightly controlled, quiet one in which only candidates loyal to the president were elected. No one has expressed a desire to actually topple Mr. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.
Tikhanovskaya has been abroad since 2020 and did not take part in Sunday's election, instead staying in Warsaw to lead protests against Lukashenko, who has ridiculed her efforts. She claimed that President Trump had cut off funding for her opposition campaign while she was in exile. He appeared to be referring to last week's executive order suspending virtually all foreign aid during a 90-day reassessment period.
The three candidates running against Lukashenko each received around 2% or less of the vote, according to official results reported by state news agency Belta. The fourth candidate, Communist Party leader Sergei Silankov, received 3.2% of the vote.
“I want to be honest,” Silankov said in a televised election debate last week, which the president did not participate in, admitting that “everyone in this studio knows that Alexander Lukashenko will win.” .
The result was not surprising since all of Lukashenko's prominent opponents were either in prison or in exile, and the Belarusian media were all rooting for the incumbent. But it remains an important event for the president, who wants to show his country — and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin — that the chaos of 2020 is calming.
European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Callas said in a statement on Sunday that the election was “neither free nor fair” and a “sham.”
But foreign election observers from Africa, the former Soviet Union and Europe's far-right parties, including Alternative for Germany, hailed the vote as a victory for democracy, with European officials and the European Parliament condemned the harsh criticism. “They say we have a dictatorship here, but I don't think so. The reality in Belarus is completely different,” said Krascho Vlachev, an observer representing Bulgaria's non-nationalist parties. told the news agency. “People are calm and communicate easily, which is not the case at all in Europe,” he added.
The election was indeed peaceful, with Lukashenko saying he was too busy to participate in debates with his four state-selected rivals or hold rallies, and he showed little interest in participating in campaign activities. It didn't happen. But in a nod to conventional politics, he signed a decree last week that will raise pensions by 10 percent starting February 1.
A recent poll in Belarus, conducted by the British research group Chatham House, showed widespread dissatisfaction in the country, which has suffered a major economic blow. Economic sanctions were imposed on the country for supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Only 11% of respondents were definitely satisfied with the economy, and just 32% said they would support Russian aggression.
The study said Lukashenko's main attraction is his “favorable image” as a “politician seeking to prevent Belarus from being drawn into a military conflict following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.”
Russian forces used Belarus as a staging area for an earlier failed offensive against Kiev in early 2022, but Lukashenko has resisted Russian pressure to send Belarusian forces to fight against Ukraine. I've done it.
After voting in the Belarusian capital Minsk on Sunday, Lukashenko predicted that “there will be some kind of solution to the conflict this year” and said he recognized that President Trump was “not an idiot or an idiot.” added. “You can't impose on us,” he said of Belarus and 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 have openly tolerated dissent and embraced the nickname “Europe's last dictator,” an insult coined in 2005 by then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He avoided criticizing Lukashenko.
While Lukashenko delights in mocking the West, especially neighboring Poland, and demonstrating loyalty to Moscow, he has also sought to improve frosty relations with Western capitals in recent months by releasing political prisoners. It shows a desire to do so.
The process, widely seen as an effort to free himself from Western sanctions, continued on Friday, with Mr Lukashenko adding more people, including five people imprisoned for “extremist crimes” (a collective term for criticizing the president). Pardoned 15 prisoners. The names of those released have not been released.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in a social media post on Sunday that the suspects included an American national he identified as Anastasia Neufer, saying: “This is someone captured under Joe Biden! ” he said. he said in the post. Mr. Rubio said Mr. Noufer was “unilaterally released” because of President Trump's leadership.
“I don't care about the West,” Lukashenko told a news conference in Minsk on Sunday, denying he was releasing prisoners to favor foreign countries. He said his decision to release some people was “based on humanitarian principles.”
None of Lukashenko's most prominent opponents, including Tikhanovskaya's husband Sergei, have been released. The United States and the European Union continued sanctions.
In a sign that authorities are expecting a more sympathetic hearing from the new Trump administration, Belarus' state media last week removed from its website a statement by the State Department criticizing Sunday's election after the inauguration in Washington. He happily announced. This was done by outgoing Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
Blinken's now-deleted statement denounced the Belarusian election as a farce, saying, “The United States and Europe have determined that elections cannot be trusted in an environment where censorship is rampant and independent media outlets no longer exist.” We join many of our allies in the
