Getting elected president in Belarus is usually pretty easy — so long as your name is Alexander Lukashenko, that is. The 65-year-old president has managed to romp home to victory no fewer than five times over the past 26 years, while also winning two referendums that made the constitution a little more to his taste. For Lukashenko the question is typically not “will I win?” but “how much will I win by?” Last time around he was content to sail home with a modest 84% of the vote; 100% would be a bit too Saddam Hussein, after all.
As a result, Belarusian elections are not something that many people pay much attention to. The Bush administration may have named Lukashenko the “last dictator in Europe” and “an outpost of tyranny” as long ago as 2005, but the country has never been high on anyone’s list of states due for regime change, whether driven from within or imposed from without.
Until now, that is. As Lukashenko approaches his sixth election on 9th August, he is suddenly facing something he is unaccustomed to: opposition. Multiple rivals have risen up to challenge him, while the usually sedate capital, Minsk, has seen major street protests. All kinds of reasons have been cited for the unrest, ranging from economic stagnation to his eccentric response to Covid (don’t worry, drink vodka) — although the fact that he’s been in charge since Clydebank’s own Wet Wet Wet were topping the charts with “Love is All Around” is probably enough to make anybody a bit weary. One unofficial Internet poll has his support at 6%. Another places it at 3%.
As a Lukashenko-watcher since 1997 I was, like the president himself, caught off-guard by these sudden developments. But does this mean that we should expect Ukraine-style upheaval? How to interpret this sudden flurry of reporting from journalists located in the countries next door? Will the bells of freedom ring, as they did for Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan in 2004 and 2005 (and then again for Ukraine in 2014)?
Perhaps; yet it must be noted that Belarus has stubbornly gone its own way for a long time now. Although its predecessor state, the Byelorussian SSR, was part of the triumvirate of republics that dissolved the USSR in December 1991 without bothering to consult any of the others, it has, since those heady days, pursued a more conservative course than Russia and Ukraine, its partners in dissolution. Whereas the Russians put up with 10 years of lawlessness and corruption before electing a strongman to bring “order and stability”, and Ukraine has put up with 30 years of lawlessness and corruption and is yet to succumb to the temptation of electing a strongman, Belarus went for a strongman the very first time it held a presidential election.
But unlike the near-teetotal judo enthusiast Putin, Lukashenko was a very conventional type of strongman, already retro in 1994. With his combover and thick moustache he was the perfect image of a Soviet regional boss, as if he had been cloned in a test tube kept on a shelf at a dacha between a jar of pickles and a bottle of home made vodka that made grandpa go blind.
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