Belarusian leader and Russian ally Alexander Lukashenko extended his 31-year rule after election officials on Monday, the 27th of January, declared him the winner of a presidential election that Western governments said was fraudulent, reports Reuters.
“We can congratulate the Republic of Belarus, we have elected a president,” Igor Karpenko, head of the country’s Central Election Commission, told a press conference in the early hours of Monday.
Lukashenko, who was not facing any challenges from any of the other four candidates, received 86.8% of the vote, according to preliminary results published on the Central Election Commission’s official Telegram account.
European politicians argued that the vote was neither free nor fair, as independent media are banned in the former Soviet republic and all leading opposition figures are either imprisoned or forced to flee abroad.
“The people of Belarus had no choice. This is a bitter day for all who long for freedom and democracy,” wrote German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on X.
Electoral officials announced that the turnout in the elections, in which 6.9 million people could vote, was 85.7%.
Asked about the imprisonment of his opponents, Lukashenko told a press conference on Sunday that they had chosen their own fate.
“Some chose prison, some chose “exile”, as you say. We are not driving anyone out of the country,” he said at the press conference, which lasted more than four hours.
He denied that his decision to release more than 250 people convicted of “extremist” activities was a message to the West to reduce its isolation.
“I don’t care about the West,” he told a press conference. “We have never given up our relations with the West. We have always been ready. But you don’t want that. So what should we do – make concessions to you or get down on our knees?”
Lukashenko, who is a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and who allowed the Russian leader to use his country to invade Ukraine in 2022, has managed to become a useful ally to Russia during his career, winning cheap oil and loans from Russia while preventing his big neighbour from devouring his country.
Demonstrations against the so-called “last dictator of Europe” took place on Sunday in Warsaw and other Eastern European cities.
Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsyhanouskaya called for the extension of Western sanctions against Belarusian companies and individuals involved in the repression of Lukashenko’s opponents and in supplying ammunition to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.
“As long as Belarus is under the control of Lukashenko and Putin, there will be a permanent threat to peace and security in the whole region,” she said.
EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas and Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos said in a statement that the bloc would continue to apply “restrictive and targeted measures against the regime”, while supporting civil society and the opposition in exile.
The war in Ukraine has tied Lukashenko more closely than ever to Putin, and Russian tactical nuclear weapons are deployed in Belarus.
Despite Lukashenko’s denials, his opponents and political analysts interpret his pardon of political prisoners as an effort to begin re-establishing relations with the West, and his recent re-election as an attempt to restore his legitimacy and get major European countries and the US to return their ambassadors to Minsk for the first time in years.
Although Lukashenko has released more than 250 in the last year on so-called humanitarian grounds, the human rights group Viasna, banned in Belarus as an “extremist” organisation, claims that there are still around 1 250 political prisoners in the country.