Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, spun off his seventh straight election victory Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a sham whose sole purpose was to cement his hold autocratic over the former Soviet republic, Ally Russia’s closest.
“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 is a staged performance by Lukashenko to cling to power at any cost.”
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Official results released early Monday gave Mr. Lukashenko another landslide victory with 86.82 percent of the vote. That’s also more than the 81 percent he claimed in the disputed 2020 election — a result that his opponents and Western governments dismissed as plausibly high and which sparked huge street protests.
With dissenting voices within the country silenced by Mr Lukashenko’s vast security apparatus, there is little chance of protests this time.
Unlike 2020, when Ms. Tikhanovskaya was allowed to run against Mr. Lukashenko and declared herself the winner, Sunday’s election was a tightly controlled and tame affair, with only candidates loyal to the president. No one has expressed any desire to actually defeat Mr. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.
Ms. Tikhanovskaya, out of the country since 2020, did not take part in Sunday’s elections and was instead in Warsaw, leading a protest against Mr. Lukashenko, who has mocked her efforts and He claimed that President Trump had cut off funding to his opposition movement in exile. He appeared to be referring to an executive order last week that halted virtually all foreign aid for a 90-day reevaluation period.
Three candidates running against Mr. Lukashenko received about two percent of the vote each, according to official results reported by Belta, the state news agency. A fourth, Communist Party leader Sergei Syrkankov, was listed as winning 3.2 percent.
During a televised election debate last week, which the president did not join, Syrankov, saying he wanted to be “honest,” acknowledged: “Everyone in this studio knows that Alexander Lukashenko will win.”
With all of Lukashenko’s important opponents in prison or exile and Belarusians all encouraging the incumbent, the outcome was a foregone conclusion. But it’s one that still mattered to the president, who is eager to show his country — and even President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that the turmoil of 2020 has been tamed.
In a statement on Sunday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, described the election as a “sham” that was “neither free nor fair.”
But foreign election observers, drawn from Africa, former Soviet republics and far-right political parties in Europe as an alternative to Germany, hailed the vote as a triumph for democracy and denounced the pie-in-the-sky criticism of the election by European officials and the European Parliament. “They say 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 from Bulgaria, told the state news agency in Belarus. “People are calm and communicate easily; In Europe this is not the case at all,” he added.
The election was certainly calm, to the point that Mr Lukashenko barely bothered to campaign, saying he was too busy to take part in a debate with four rival state-selected candidates or hold rallies. In a nod to conventional politics, however, last week he signed a decree increasing pensions by 10% starting February 1.
A recent public opinion poll in Belarus by Chatham House, a British research group, indicated widespread dissatisfaction with the economy, which has been hit hard by Economic sanctions imposed on the country for its support of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Only 11 percent of respondents were very satisfied with the economy, while only 32 percent said they supported invading Russia.
Lukashenko’s main appeal, according to the poll, is his “favorable image” as a “politician trying to prevent Belarus from being drawn into the military conflict following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Russian troops were using Belarus as a staging ground for an initial, abortive push towards Kyiv in early 2022, but Mr Lukashenko has resisted pressure from Moscow to send Belarus troops to join the fight against Ukraine.
After casting his vote on Sunday in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Lukashenko predicted that “there will be some kind of resolution this year” to the conflict, adding that President Trump is “not an idiot, not a fool” and he acknowledges that “you can’t push us around,” referring to Belarus and Russia. “We will see the light at the end of the tunnel this year,” he said of the war.
His nominal rivals in Sunday’s vote all avoided criticism of Mr. Lukashenko, who did not openly dissent and embraced his moniker as “Europe’s last dictator,” a slur coined in 2005 by the U.S. secretary of state at ‘era, Condoleezza Rice.
While delightful at taunting the West, particularly neighboring Poland, and showing his loyalty to Moscow, Lukashenko has in recent months signaled a desire to improve frosty relations with Western capitals by releasing political prisoners.
That process, widely seen as an effort to gain relief from Western sanctions, continued on Friday when Mr. Lukashenko pardoned 15 more prisoners, including five people jailed for “extremist crimes,” a blanket term used to describe criticism of the president. The names of those released were not made public.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a social media post on Sunday, indicated that he included a U.S. citizen he identified as Anastasia Nuhfer, “who was taken under Joe Biden!” He said in the post. Rubio said Ms. Nuhfer was “unilaterally released,” thanks to President Trump’s leadership.
At a news conference in Minsk on Sunday, Mr. Lukashenko denied releasing prisoners for curry favors abroad, saying: “I don’t give a damn about the West.” He said his decision to free some people “is based on the principle of humanity.”
None of Mr. Lukashenko’s most prominent opponents, who include Ms. 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 hearing from the new Trump administration, Belarus’ state media gleefully reported last week that, following the inauguration in Washington, the State Department had removed from its website a statement critical of Sunday’s election that he had made was made by the outgoing secretary of state, Antony J. Blinken.
Blinken’s deleted statement denounced 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.”