Five candidates will take part in Belarus’ presidential election on Sunday, the 26th of January, but there has been only one winner in the last 31 years – Alexander Lukashenko – and he is believed to have already secured a new five-year term in a vote that the exiled opposition calls a sham and calls on Belarusians to tick a box to reject all the candidates on offer, writes Reuters.
Lukashenko has been in power in Belarus since 1994.
Lukashenko, 70, is a self-proclaimed leader who is too busy working for the country to get involved in the election campaign. “To be honest, I don’t follow it. I just don’t have time for it,” he said last week.
Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has been called “the last dictator in Europe”, has no clear successor. After he was nearly ousted in 2020 by mass protests over alleged vote-rigging that favoured Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Lukashenko’s forces detained tens of thousands of people and imprisoned or exiled opposition leaders.
Recently, he has begun to release some members of the opposition, in what appears to be a possible attempt to improve relations with the West.
Sunday’s vote takes place in a country where independent media are banned and blocked. The human rights group Viasna, which is described as an extremist organisation in the country, claims that there are around 1 250 political prisoners in the country; Lukashenko denies that there are any.
Ivan Kravtsov, Secretary of the Coordination Council of the Exiled Opposition, admitted that the opposition is finding it difficult to establish links with the Belarusian people.
“Politics is not a priority for most people. The priority is to survive,” he said. “The 2020 campaign was seen by people as a real opportunity to change the government. Now, you know, sometimes opposition leaders in exile struggle to stay relevant inside the country.”
Tatsiana Chulitskaya, a Belarusian academic at Vilnius University in Lithuania, said that the four alternative candidates did not dare to criticise the President.
“They are not candidates in the normal sense of the word. They are simply playing a role in this campaign. They are not competing with Lukashenko”, she said.
But while the outcome is not in doubt, Lukashenko will start his seventh term facing difficult challenges in trying to balance relations with Moscow and the West, especially in the light of possible Russia-Ukraine peace talks.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Putin, allowed Russia to use Belarus to invade Ukraine in 2022, leading to sanctions by the West and Russia deployed its nuclear weapons in the country the following year.
Analysts believe that Lukashenko could seek better relations with the West and the lifting of sanctions if the war ends. This would be in line with his decades-long practice of periodically flirting with the West to prevent Belarus from becoming totally dependent on Russia and risking being swallowed up by its big neighbour.
“If the war ends, Lukashenko will have a certain chance if he wants to continue this tactic of balancing relations between Russia and the West,” Chulitskaya said.
As a first tentative sign of easing repression, Lukashenko has since last July issued so-called humanitarian pardons to 250 people serving prison sentences for alleged extremist activities.
He has also allowed limited access in prison for two of the best-known opposition figures, Maria Kalesnikava and Viktor Babariko, who have been isolated and unable to communicate with the outside world for almost two years.
The opposition says it welcomes these developments, but many more people remain in prison and arrests continue.
Its exiled leader, Tsikhanouskaya, told Reuters in an interview this week that the partial release of political prisoners was part of Lukashenko’s game with the West.
“We have to stop the repression, we have to release all the prisoners and maybe then we will talk,” she said.