Voting under way in Belarus with Lukashenko set to extend 30-year rule | Elections News
Longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko is set to win a seventh terms as he runs unopposed by genuine challengers.
Polls are under way in Belarus for a presidential election, with longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko expected to extend his more than three decades in power in the absence of any real opposition.
Voters began casting their ballots at 8am local time (05:00 GMT) on Sunday in the country’s first presidential vote since Lukashenko crushed mass protests against his government in 2020 and permitted Russia to use Belarusian territory for its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The 70-year-old former collective farm boss has been in power in Belarus since 1994 and is seeking a seventh term.
The country’s last presidential election in 2020 ended with nationwide protests, unprecedented in the history of the country of nine million people. The opposition and Western nations accused Lukashenko of rigging the election and imposed sanctions.
In response, his government launched a sweeping crackdown, leaving more than 1,000 people imprisoned, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, founder of the Viasna Human Rights Centre.
The United Nations estimates that some 300,000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020 – mostly to Poland and Lithuania. They will not be able to vote, with Belarus having scrapped voting abroad.
“All our opponents and enemies should understand: do not hope, we will never repeat what we had in 2020,” Lukashenko told a stadium in Minsk during a ceremony on Friday.
Reporting from a polling centre in the capital, Minsk, Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith said the lead-up to the vote was marked by both a lack of enthusiasm and campaigning.
“Lukashenko himself has said he’s too busy running the country to go out campaign,” he said, adding that it was hard to gauge the mood in the country as people appeared unwilling to speak openly.
“There [appears to be] no appetite to protest because people know that they risk getting arrested – and even overseas opposition groups have said now is not the time to protest,” Smith said.
Still, Smith noted that authorities had largely allowed foreign press to cover the election – a possible sign that Lukashenko might want “to try to repair relations with the West”.
“He maybe sees that perhaps later in the year there might be some sort of a peace deal [between Russia and] Ukraine and he wants to position Belarus for what happens after … and what role Belarus might play,” Smith added.
‘Europe’s last dictator’
Lukashenko’s iron-fisted rule, which began two years after the demise of the Soviet Union, earned him the nickname of “Europe’s last dictator” – which he embraces – relying on subsidies and political support from close ally Russia.
The four candidates running against Lukashenko have been picked to give the election an air of democracy and few know who they are. They are loyal to him and praise his rule.
“I am entering the race not against, but together with Lukashenko, and I am ready to serve as his vanguard,” said Communist Party candidate Sergei Syrankov, who favours criminalising LGBTQ activities and rebuilding monuments to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
Candidate Alexander Khizhnyak, head of the Republican Party of Labour and Justice, led a voting precinct in Minsk in 2020 and promised to prevent a “repeat of disturbances”.
Oleg Gaidukevich, head of the Liberal Democratic Party, supported Lukashenko in 2020 and urged fellow candidates to “make Lukashenko’s enemies nauseous”.
The fourth challenger, Hanna Kanapatskaya, actually got 1.7 percent of the vote in 2020 and says she is the “only democratic alternative to Lukashenko”, promising to lobby for freeing political prisoners but warning supporters against “excessive initiative”.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s top diplomat, called the election a “sham” in a post on X, saying “Lukashenko doesn’t have any legitimacy”.
