Europe’s longest-serving leader, Belarusian President Alexander G. Lukashenko, scored his seventh consecutive election victory on Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a farce, the sole purpose of which was to consolidate his autocratic hold on the former Soviet Union. republic, Russia’s closest ally.
“Don’t use the word election to describe this farce,” said Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, an opposition leader who fled Belarus after the country’s previous presidential vote in 2020 and a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests over election fraud. “It’s a setup by Lukashenko to cling to power at any cost.”
A survey of voters leaving polling stations, published by state media on Sunday evening, showed Lukashenko won 87.6% of the vote, more than the 81% he said he won in 2020. Exit polls are controlled by the state like all aspects of elections in Belarus and generally reflect the final result.
Unlike 2020, when Ms. Tikhanovskaya was allowed to run against Lukashenko and declared herself the winner, Sunday’s election was a tightly controlled and tame affair, with only candidates loyal to the president participating. Nobody he has expressed a desire to effectively defeat Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.
Four rival candidates, according to the exit poll, each garnered less than 2% of the vote, with the exception of Communist Party leader Sergei Syrankov, who got 2.7%.
With all of Lukashenko’s prominent opponents in prison or exile and the Belarusian media rooting for the current president, the result was a foregone conclusion. But it’s something that still matters to the president, who is eager to show his country — and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin — that the turbulence of 2020 has been tamed.
In a statement on Sunday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, described the election as a “farce” that was “neither free nor fair.”
But foreign election observers, from far-right political parties such as Alternative for Germany and other pro-Russian groups, hailed the vote as a triumph for democracy and denounced harsh criticism of the elections from the European Parliament and of other institutions. there is a dictatorship here, but I don’t think so: the reality in Belarus is completely different,” Krastyo Vrachev, an observer representing a fringe nationalist party in Bulgaria, told the Belarusian state news agency. “People are calm and communicate with ease, in Europe this is not the case at all,” he added.
The election was certainly uneventful, so much so that Lukashenko barely bothered to campaign, saying he was too busy to take part in a debate with four rival state-selected candidates or organize rallies. In a nod to conventional politics, however, last week he signed a decree increasing pensions by 10% starting February 1.
A recent survey conducted among the Belarusian public by Chatham House, a British research group, highlighted widespread dissatisfaction with the economy, which has been hit hard by the economic sanctions imposed on the country for its support of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Only 11% of respondents said they were strongly satisfied with the economy, while only 32% said they supported the Russian invasion.
Lukashenko’s main attraction, according to the poll, is his “favorable image” as a “politician trying to prevent Belarus from becoming involved in the military conflict following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Russian troops used Belarus as a staging point for a failed first attack toward Kiev in early 2022, but Lukashenko has resisted pressure from Moscow to send Belarusian troops to join the fight against Ukraine.
After voting on Sunday in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Lukashenko predicted that “this year there will be some kind of resolution” of the conflict, adding that President Trump “is not an idiot, nor a fool” and recognizes that “he does not you can make fun of us,” referring to Belarus and Russia. “This year we will see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said of the war.
His nominal rivals in Sunday’s vote all avoided criticism of Lukashenko, who tolerates no open dissent and has embraced his nickname “Europe’s last dictator,” a slur coined in 2005 by the then-secretary of state of the United States, Condoleeza Rice.
While he delights in mocking the West, particularly neighboring Poland, and displaying his loyalty to Moscow, Lukashenko has signaled in recent months a desire to improve frosty relations with Western capitals by freeing political prisoners.
This process, aimed at gaining relief from Western sanctions, continued on Friday when Lukashenko pardoned 15 more prisoners, including five people jailed for “extremist crimes,” a catch-all term used to describe criticism of the president. The names of the freed people have not been made public.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a social media post Sunday, indicated they included a U.S. citizen he called Anastasia Nuhfer “who was taken under JOE BIDEN!” Mr. Rubio said she was “unconditionally released” thanks to President Trump’s leadership.
None of Lukashenko’s most prominent opponents, including Tikhanovskaya’s husband, Sergei, have been freed. The United States and the European Union left sanctions in place.
In a sign that authorities are hoping for a more sympathetic ear from the new Trump administration, Belarusian state media gleefully reported last week that, after the inauguration in Washington, the State Department had removed a statement from its website criticism of Sunday’s election was made by outgoing Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
Blinken’s deleted statement denounced the Belarus election as a farce, saying: “The United States joins many of our European allies in assessing that the elections cannot be credible in an environment where censorship is ubiquitous and the media independent they no longer exist.”