Belarus is holding elections, but the outcome is not difficult to predict
Amid a series of high-stakes elections set to be held around the world this year, the Eastern European country of Belarus on Sunday offered an alternative to the unpredictability of democracy: a vote for Parliament without a single candidate criticized the country’s despotic leader.
Opposition parties are all banned – belonging to one party is a crime – and the four sanctioned parties contesting the elections have struggled only to outdo each other in their show of unwavering loyalty to the country’s leader. President Aleksandr G. Lukashenkowho has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for thirty years.
For the government, Sunday’s elections – the first since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which borders Belarus to the south – are important as an opportunity to show Moscow, its allyit has that suppresses all domestic opposition and survived the economic and other stresses imposed by the war. Russia, which has had doubts about Mr Lukashenko’s durability and reliability in the past, launched its invasion in February 2022 partly from Belarusian territory.
Svetlana TikhanovskayaAn banished opponent of Mr Lukashenko said: “These so-called elections are nothing more than a circus show. It’s not even entertaining.”
The Belarusian elections are similar in design and predictability to the vote planned in Russia next month anoint Mr. Putin for a fifth term in the Kremlin.
The European Union, which for years harbored hopes that Belarus, wedged between Russia and Poland, could be pulled out of the Kremlin’s sphere of influence, has dismissed the entire process as a sham. The bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, denounced last week Mr Lukashenko’s “continued senseless violation of human rights and unprecedented level of repression in the run-up to the upcoming elections. Those responsible will be held accountable.”
With the outcome of Sunday’s election – a Parliament packed with Mr Lukashenko’s supporters – a foregone conclusion, the only uncertainty is turnout, and even that figure is likely to be suspect given Mr Lukashenko’s stranglehold over the media and the election process. Same-day voting for local councils will produce a similarly predictable outcome.
Four parties loyal to the president are fielding candidates for the elections: the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, Belaya Rus and the Republican Party of Labor and Justice. Mr Lukashenko is nominally an independent, like Mr Putin in Russia.
Ms Tikhanovskaya took on Mr Lukashenko in a 2020 presidential election, claimed victory and then fled to neighboring Lithuania at the beginning of a brutal crackdown on the president’s opponents carried out with the help of Moscow. She has called on her supporters to boycott Sunday’s vote.
She urged voters to avoid Lukashenko loyalists at the ballot and offered an alternative: an AI-generated candidate called Yas, created by the opposition. “Frankly, he is more real than any candidate the regime has to offer.” she said on social media: “And the best part? He can’t be arrested!”
To increase turnout, Belarus’ Central Election Commission has allowed four days of early voting. By the time the polls opened Sunday morning, the This is reported by state news agency Belta43.6 percent of registered voters had already cast their votes – more than halfway to the 77 percent turnout in the last parliamentary elections in 2019.
Belarusians who do not vote risk losing their jobs at state-owned companies and institutions or being rounded up for questioning by state security services, exiled opposition activists said.
At the same time, Belarusians living abroad who cannot be expected not to spoil their ballots or write the names of alternative candidates are all excluded. An election law passed last year abolished polling stations abroad.
It is the first time Belarus has held national elections since Mr Lukashenko claimed an unlikely landslide victory, his sixth in a row, with 80 percent of the vote against Ms Tikhanovskaya and other rival candidates in the fraud-tainted 2020 presidential race. .
Unlike those elections, which allowed several opposition candidates to vote and were followed by huge street protests over rigged results, Sunday’s vote only offers a choice between different shades of regime loyalists. It has also been preceded by a wave of repression to prevent any risk of demonstrations. Ballot photography, which helped reveal widespread fraud in 2020, has been declared illegal.
The only meaning of the vote is according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Supportan interest group, was another grim sign that, after four years of arrests and a steady shrinking of already tight political space, “Belarus’ authoritarian regime has transformed itself into a totalitarian system.”
“Free and fair elections cannot take place in this environment of total repression,” the institute added.
Warning against “extremists” — the government’s collective term for dissidents in one of the world’s most repressive police states — Mr. Lukashenko this week ordered law enforcement agencies, including Belarus’ KGB security service, an unreformed and brutal remnant of the former Soviet regime, to organize street patrols with small arms to ensure security.
According to this weekend Viasna, a human rights group which oversees detentions, Belarus had 1,419 political prisoners, mainly people jailed after the 2020 elections. Among them are leaders of dissolved opposition parties and the co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, Ales Bialiatski. Torture, both physical and psychological, is commonplace in an archipelago of bleak prisons, according to human rights observers.
Belarus provided logistical support to the Russian invading army and allowed its territory to be used as a base for a failed Russian attack on Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. But that’s true resisted pressure from Moscow to send its own troops into battle in Ukraine, one of the few things Mr Lukashenko has done that enjoys broad popular support.
Like Mr. Putin in Russia, Mr. Lukashenko has used the war in Ukraine to portray his country as a besieged fortress threatened by NATO and domestic traitors. He has repeatedly claimed, baselessly, that Poland, a NATO member that controlled large parts of what is now western Belarus before World War II, is amassing troops in preparation on an attack to regain lost territory.
Ethnic Poles in western Belarus have been targeted by a sweeping crackdown, with Andrzej Poczobut, a prominent figure in the community, receives a prison sentence of eight years last year for ‘incitement to hatred’ and ‘the rehabilitation of Nazism’.
Belarusian Defense Minister Viktor Khrenin claimed in an interview with a Kremlin-controlled television station this week that Ukraine had amassed more than 110,000 soldiers on the border with Belarus. There is no evidence for that. He also threatened to shoot down “without warning” NATO planes that violated Belarusian airspace.
The saber-rattling is largely aimed at a domestic audience that Lukashenko must mobilize in the run-up to elections whose outcome is in no doubt but which could nevertheless prove embarrassing if not enough people vote. That prospect seems unlikely, experts say, given the risks of staying home.
Western election observers have been barred from Belarus, a ban that Sergei Lebedev, the head of an observer mission sent by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a largely moribund organization made up of Russia and seven other mostly authoritarian former Soviet republics, said was “logical and justified.” used to be’. “Because “there is no need to come here to look for fictitious shortcomings and violations in the organization of elections.”