President Belarusian Alexandre G. Loukachenko, the oldest manager in Europe, won his seventh consecutive electoral victory on Sunday in a ballot that his opponents in exile qualified as imposture and whose only objective was to consolidate his autocratic grip on the ‘Ancient Soviet Republic. , the ally closest to Russia.
“Do not use the word election to describe this farce,” said Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, an opposition leader who fled Belarus after the previous presidential election in 2020 and the brutal repression of national demonstrations against electoral fraud . “It is a staging of Loukachenko to hang on to power at all costs.”
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Official results published early Monday Awarded to Mr. Loukachenko a new overwhelming victory with 86.82 percent of the votes. It is even more than the 81 % that he had claimed in the disputed elections of 2020 – a result that his opponents and Western governments qualified as an improbably high and which sparked huge street demonstrations.
The dissident voices being silenced inside the country by the vast security apparatus of Mr. Loukachenko, there is little chance that there are protests this time.
Unlike 2020, where Ms. Tikhanovskaya was authorized to appear against Mr. Loukachenko and declared himself a winner, the election of Sunday was a closely controlled and docile affair, featuring only candidates loyal to the president. None expressed the desire to defeat Mr. Loukachenko, who has directed Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.
Ms. Tikhanovskaya, outside the country since 2020, did not participate in the elections on Sunday and was in Warsaw, leading a demonstration against Mr. Loukachenko, who made fun of his efforts and said President Trump had cut off his exile opposition movement. It seems to refer to a decree of last week which suspended practically any foreign aid for a period of re -evaluation of 90 days.
According to the official results reported by Belta, the official news agency Belta, three candidates against Mr. Loukachenko each collected approximately or less than two of the votes. A fourth, the leader of the Communist Party, Sergei Syrankov, obtained 3.2 percent.
During a television electoral debate last week, in which the president did not participate, Mr. Syrankov, saying wanted to be “honest”, admitted: “Everyone in this studio knows that Alexandre Loukachenko will win.
While all the main opponents of Mr. Loukachenko are in prison or exile and the Belarusian media all applaud the outgoing president, the result was acquired in advance. But this is a question that always counts for the president, eager to show his country – as well as to the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin – that the disturbances of 2020 have been mastered.
In a press release on Sunday, The head of the European Union foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, described the election of “imposture” which “was neither free nor equitable”.
But foreign observers of elections, from Africa, former Soviet republics and far -right political parties in Europe as an alternative for Germany, praised the vote as a triumph of democracy and denounced the acerbic criticisms of the election on the part of European officials and the European Parliament. “They say that there is a dictatorship here, but I don’t think so. Reality in Belarus is completely different,” Krastyo Truev, observer representing a Marginal Nationalist Party in Bulgaria, at the official Biélorusian news agency . “People are calm and communicate easily; In Europe, this is not the case at all, “he added.
The election certainly took place in calm, so much so that Mr. Loukachenko barely took the trouble to campaign, saying that he was too busy to participate in a debate with four rival candidates selected by the State or to organize rallies. However, in the blink of an eye to conventional policy, he signed last week a decree increasing pensions by 10 percent from February 1.
A Recent public opinion in Biélorussia carried out by Chatham HouseA British research group reported generalized dissatisfaction with the economy, which was hardly affected by the crisis. Economic sanctions imposed on the country because of its support for the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in February 2022. Only 11 percent of those questioned declared themselves completely satisfied with the economy, while only 32 percent declare support the Russian invasion.
The main attraction of Mr. Loukachenko, according to the investigation, is his “favorable image” of “politician striving to prevent Belarus from being involved in the military conflict which followed the Russian invasion of the Ukraine ”.
Russian troops used Belarus as a basis for a first aborted offensive to kyiv in early 2022, but Mr. Loukachenko resisted the pressure from Moscow to send Belarusian troops to join the fight against Ukraine.
After having voted on Sunday in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, Mr. Loukachenko predicted that “there will be a kind of resolution this year” to the conflict, adding that President Trump “is neither an idiot, nor a fool “And admits that” you cannot jostle us “, in reference to Belarus and Russia. “This year, we will see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he said about war.
His nominal rivals during Sunday’s vote all avoided criticizing Mr. Loukachenko, who does not tolerate any open dissent and adopted his nickname “last dictator of Europe”, an insult invented in 2005 by the American secretary of state The time, Condoleezza Rice.
While rejoicing to taunt the West, in particular the neighboring Poland, and to display its loyalty to Moscow, Mr. Loukachenko has expressed in recent months his desire to improve icy relations with Western capitals by releasing political prisoners .
This process, widely considered as an effort to obtain lightening of Western sanctions, continued on Friday when Mr. Loukachenko pardoned 15 other prisoners, including five people imprisoned for “extremist crimes”, a general term used to describe criticism with regard to the president. The names of the liberated people were not made public.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in a publication on social networks On Sunday, he indicated that it was an American citizen whom he identified as Anastasia Nuhfer, “who was taken under Joe Biden!” He said in the post. Rubio said Ms. Nuhfer had been “unilaterally released”, thanks to President Trump’s leadership.
During a press conference in Minsk on Sunday, Mr. Loukachenko denied having released prisoners to attract favors from abroad, declaring: “I don’t care about the West”. He said that his decision to release certain people “is based on the principle of humanity”.
None of Mr. Loukachenko’s most eminent opponents, including Ms. Tikhanovskaya’s husband, Sergei, has been released. The United States and the European Union have maintained its sanctions.
A sign that the authorities hope for a more favorable listening from the new Trump administration, the Belarusian state media reported last week with joy that after the inauguration in Washington, the State Department had withdrawn from his website a declaration Critique of the Sunday election made by the outgoing Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken.
Mr. Blinken’s deleted declaration denounced the Belarusian elections as a farce, declaring: “The United States joins many of our European allies to assess that the elections cannot be credible in an environment where censorship is omnipresent and where independent media no longer exists. »»
