Belarus will hold presidential elections on Sunday. The winning candidate is the same as the past 26 years – Alexander Lukashenko, the authoritarian leader who has ruled the former Soviet Union since 1994.
The voting result is not in doubt, but instead of the smoothly controlled coronation that was expected, Lukashenko, often nicknamed “the last dictator of Europe”, faces an unusual challenge to his government.
Ahead of the election, Belarus has seen weeks of protests, partly fueled by anger at Lukashenko’s treatment of the coronavirus pandemic. Tens of thousands of people attended peaceful gatherings in the capital Minsk, as well as thousands more in small towns in the country. A rally in Minsk last month was the largest demonstration in Belarus since the fall of the Soviet Union.
At the same time he confronts the popular dissatisfied, Lukashenko is facing other challenges on multiple fronts. There is greater dissatisfaction among the elite of Belarus and most significant is its relationship with the main sponsor of Belarus, Russia.
“Until now, his power has not seriously threatened. Now, for the first time, he could lose it,” said Alexander Feduta, who was a campaign assistant for Lukashenko in the 1990s and is now a critical analyst. about him.
The protests have gathered around three women, who are now leading the attempt to remove Lukashenko from office. At her head is Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a former teacher who until a few weeks ago had been a stay-at-home mom.
Tikhanovskaya stepped back reluctantly after her husband, Sergey Tikhanovsky, a popular blogger, was jailed and prevented from running in the elections.
The other major opposition campaigns are united behind Tikhanovskaya. She is joined by Veronika Tsepkalo, whose husband, Valery Tsepkalo fled to Belarus with her children after being barred from the elections. The third woman, Maria Kolesnikova, was the head of a campaign by another popular candidate, Viktor Babariko, a former banker who was jailed on alleged fraud charges shortly before the election.
“My first step was just for love, love for my husband,” Tikhanovskaya told ABC News in an interview in Minsk on Wednesday.
“At that moment, I saw how many people supported him and how many people wanted these changes, how many people were tired, and I felt responsible for all these people,” she said.
Tikhanovskaya’s campaign platform is simple: release political prisoners and then call new free and fair elections within six months. She said she did not want to remain a politician if Lukashenko stepped down.
The three women have focused on a wave of dissatisfaction with Lukashenko, based on anger over a bad economy and accumulated fatigue with Lukashenko. But it’s a joke obtained by Lukashenko’s dismissal of the coronavirus pandemic.
Lukashenko denounced the pandemic as a global hysteria and refused to impose significant quarantine measures in Belarus, despite pleadings by the World Health Organization. Government government statistics for COVID-19 have remained suspiciously low, even though the official census shows that there are at least 68,000 cases in Belarus.
Many Belarusians, however, took their own measures, kept their children home from school and formed their own volunteer groups to collect protective equipment for health workers.
Yaroslav Romanchuk, an economist who ran against Lukashenko in 2010, said the authorities’ reaction was reminiscent of the Soviet response to the 1986 Chernobyl massacre.
“That was negligence, stupidity and arrogance in the same bottle. And that’s what made people so angry,” Romanchuk said. “The first kind of sign of massive protests was when parents, like myself, did not let our children go to school because of coronavirus.”
Lukashenko has responded to the protests by reducing the number of women and blaming them for foreign powers, which he has accused of a revolution like the one in Ukraine in 2014. He has proposed not only to Western countries but also more directly to Moscow. .
Last week, Belarusian security forces suspected they had detained 33 Russian monsters at a resort near Minsk, claiming they had been sent to destabilize the elections. Belarussian TV broadcast video of special forces holding the men, who they said belonged to Wagner, a name for a Kremlin-linked private military contractor in Syria and other hotspots around the world.
Lukashenko has claimed to have discovered foreign plots before previous elections and many analysts said they suspected this was at least in part a pre-election spectacle. But the men captured this time also seem to be real, with some previously known to reporters as fighting in eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has expressed interest in some extraditions.
Russian officials have said the men were on their way to work as security guards in an unnamed South American country.
As for the reality, the incident marks the mistrust between Moscow and Lukashenko, which has diminished in recent years and now poses an uncomfortable problem for Lukashenko.
Russia and Belarus are already heavily integrated, but recently the Kremlin has been pushing Lukashenko to accept a deeper union. Attempting to maintain more independence, Lukashenko had turned to the West, in particular restoring relations with the United States, which for the first time in more than a decade is due to post an ambassador in Minsk this year.
The fear for Lukashenko now, analysts said, is that the Kremlin may be open to him being replaced by another figure, if they are friendly to Russia.
“It is less and less likely that the Kremlin will come to the aid of Lukashenko at a future critical moment of political tension in Belarus,” wrote Artyom Schraibman, an analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center this week.
None of the past six elections in Belarus has been considered by international observers freely and honestly. The main questions, analysts say, are how many will protest if the vote appears heavily fabricated and whether Lukashenko uses force to disperse protesters.
In recent days, Lukashenko has also toured guided tours and state television has shown heavily armed insurgent policemen doing drills to disperse protesters. And authorities have begun blocking the large peaceful rallies led by TIkhanovskaya. On Thursday, soldiers set up a military camp in a Minsk park, where their campaign had hoped to gather tens of thousands. Some smaller gatherings were also dispersed with arrests.
Tikhanovskaya said if people protested after the election, she would run for office. She said that if she was arrested after the vote, she hoped a letter from other countries would follow.
Protestants have said the atmosphere feels different from previous years, saying much of the fear has gone away, although that could change quickly. However, a violent eruption could trigger a worsening crisis for Lukashenko, some observers said.
“He is losing power. He is slowly losing it step by step, and he would lose power even faster” as Lukashenko responds to violent protests on the August 9 and 10 election days, Romanchuk said.
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