70, will remain president of Belarus three decades after coming to power. He obtained an overwhelming 86.82% of the votes in Sunday’s elections and will therefore continue to lead a country in which no one under the age of 31 has known another president. The shadow of fraud hangs over the elections, marked by opacity and with . “You can congratulate the Republic of Belarus, we have elected a president,” the head of the country’s Central Electoral Commission, Igor Karpenko, said this Monday. According to this organization, the massive participation has been 85.7%. The second most voted option (barely 3.6% of the votes) was the ballot with the slogan “against all.”
They were Lukashenko’s seventh election as a candidate, but on this occasion the entire opposition had been crushed before the vote took place. The European Commission has described the elections as “electoral simulation” and has demanded that Lukashenko release the 1,245 political prisoners that the NGO Viasná estimates are still imprisoned. “The EU will continue to impose targeted sanctions against the regime while financially supporting Belarusian civil society and democracy,” said the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, in a statement.
The Belarusian leader does not yet plan to give up the throne he has held since 1994. “When the time comes, we will think about it,” he said on Sunday. In the previous elections, in 2020, he received 80.1% of the votes, compared to 10.1% for his rival, , whose candidacy united the entire opposition. The allegations of fraud led to accusations that the regime harshly repressed.
“If five years ago we saw that there were a few crazy people, today Belarus is different. “She has been vaccinated,” Lukashenko concluded, adding that if he completes his new mandate until 2030 he will equal the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and the Portuguese Antonio Salazar (Portugal) as the European heads of state who have held power for the longest time since the last century, 36 years, and those who only surpass the 40 years of the Albanian Enver Hoxha. “I am not looking for a successor,” the re-elected president insisted, although he made it clear that he will try to make the regime survive him: “The future presidents will be the current governors, ministers and senior officials.”
The elections began on Tuesday, January 21, with an early vote that has raised enormous doubts among opponents. His suspicion is that the authorities put a huge amount of votes into the polls in those first days, thanks to the fact that their electoral commissions in turn controlled the stamps. Participation already exceeded 50% of the census in all the schools visited by this newspaper on Sunday morning, despite the fact that the flow of voters was small at that time.
Lukashenko faced four alleged rivals. Among them, the only independent candidate was the liberal Hanna Kanapatskaya, who completely refused to join the protests over electoral fraud and who now thanks the president for having resisted Russian Vladimir Putin’s pleas to involve Belarus in the invasion of Ukraine. Kanapatskaya obtained a meager 1.86%, according to the electoral committee.
The supposedly most voted option, after Lukashenko’s, was the “vote against all”, with 3.6%. Discontent with the regime is visible on the street, but the terror of dissenting out loud also floats in the air.
“I think I will vote against everyone, I feel like I have to do something, even if it is useless,” a Belarusian who had participated in the 2020 demonstrations explained to this newspaper on the eve of the elections. Since then, she has left politics completely. On the other hand – almost five years later, the Belarusian KGB continues to track down images and publications from that time – and only thinks about leaving the country before his children come of age.
Observers from other countries, most of them friends, such as Russia, have participated in the elections. But no reputable body has verified the cleanliness of the vote. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which also did not scrutinize the 2020 elections, received an invitation from Minsk just 10 days before the process took place. Without time to prepare serious supervision, he refused to lend his image to Lukashenko’s elections.
Sergei Vozniak led a communist party that was liquidated by the Government. In 2020 he supported the candidate Andrei Dmítriev, who ended up imprisoned in 2023, and in these elections he supported Kanapatskaya despite being “ideologically antagonistic.” Without any hope of defeating Lukashenko, his objective was reduced to being able to give a small voice to critical Belarusians and fight for amnesty for other dissidents.
Before going to a soulless picket in the center of Minsk, Vozniak explained to this newspaper some “improvements” that, in his opinion, could be made in the elections. On the one hand, he regretted that the polling stations – which in Belarus are not made up of citizens chosen by lottery – were made up of members of social groups close to the Government, such as public employee organizations, legal unions and other groups whose bosses at work have were at the same time the presidents of the electoral commissions. “If I am a teacher and my director is also head of the commission, I am not going to discuss anything with him because I could lose my job or my bonus,” Vozniak stressed.
On the other hand, this politician regrets that the scrutiny is not transparent. “In other countries all the votes are pooled and counted. Here we have 13 members of the commission. The thousands of ballots are distributed among each person in small batches and each person counts their own. I don’t know yours and you don’t know mine. Thus, the final results are not known,” he exemplifies.
The person in charge of transmitting the final result to the central electoral commission is the head of each college, who also controls the seal with which their ballot boxes are sealed. According to sources from the human rights organization Viasná, this leaves it in their hands to fill the ballot boxes with votes in favor of Lukashenko throughout the election week.
The Lukashenko regime sentenced the director of Viasná, Alés Bialiatski, to 23 years in prison for defending anti-government protesters. He is one of 1,245 political prisoners that his platform has identified, including the opposition’s former favorite candidate, Viktor Babariko, and his campaign manager, Maria Kolesnikova. None of them was heard from for a couple of years, locked in cells in inhumane conditions, until Lukashenko allowed a brief reunion of the two politicians with their families in 2024.
“The law is harsh, but it is the law,” the Belarusian president responded this Sunday when asked about the fate of the political prisoners. In addition, he challenged dissidents who fled the country to a dangerous return, including Svetlana Tijanóvskaya, who in 2020 assumed the sole candidacy of all opponents. “Come and respond. “If you have violated the law so cruelly, you should not go to such remote places,” Lukashenko declared. His regime has granted some pardons in recent months while continuing to detain hundreds of citizens. According to the president, this small amnesty does not seek a rapprochement with the European Union: “I say it publicly: we do not want to use this process to send a signal to the West. “I don’t care at all about the West.”
