Voting has closed in Belarus for the presidential elections. According to exit polls from the Committee of Belarusian Youth Organizations, the current president Alexander Lukashenko won the election with 87.6% of the voteswinning his seventh term. The official results will be announced this Monday, 27th.
The opposition calls the election “farce”very similar to the last one in 2020, which triggered months of protests unprecedented in the history of the country of 9 million people. Lukashenko is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin and depends on subsidies and political support from Moscow to remain in power.
According to the Russian news agency Tass, the president of the Liberal Democratic Party, Oleg Gaidukevich, received 1.8% of the vote, businesswoman Anna Kanopatskaya 1.6%; the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Sergei Syrankov, 2.7%; the chairman of the Republican Party of Labor and judge Alexander Khizhnyak, 1.2%. About 5% of voters did not vote.
President Lukashenko’s smiling face appeared on campaign posters across Belarus on Sunday in an orchestrated election all but guaranteed to give the 70-year-old autocrat another term beyond his three decades in power.
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