Belarusians are voting in a presidential election on Sunday as President Alexander Lukashenko seeks a seventh mandate to rule.
For the past 30 years, Lukashenko, 70, dubbed by many analysts as “Europe’s last dictator”, has ruled over the country with an iron fist, crushing all opposition and voices against him.
The president, who has not engaged with an election campaign this run, told factory workers last week, “To be honest I don’t follow it. I simply don’t have time for it.”
But after the last election in 2020, when the leader was declared the winner despite reports of a groundswell of popular anger against him, mass protests erupted. The opposition and the West claimed his win was fraudulent and stolen from the leading candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who was forced to flee the country.
Now, with his political opponents either jailed or exiled, Lukashenko’s success on Sunday is widely believed to be all but guaranteed.
The election was initially planned for August but was moved to deep winter. There was a reason, Belarusian political analyst Valery Karbalevich suggested to The Associated Press news agency: “There won’t be mass protests in freezing January.”
Here’s what you need to know about the election:
When do ballots open?
Polls opened across the country at 8am (05:00 GMT) and will stay open until 8pm (17:00 GMT).
Belarus operates on a simple majority system, where citizens vote for the head of state and the legislature every five years.
Belarusians aged 18 and above will be able to take part.
Results are expected by February 5, and a second round, if necessary, will take place on February 12.
How many people are expected to vote?
State news agency BelTA reported on Friday that after three days of early voting, turnout was 27.15 percent.
It said last week that in an opinion poll conducted in December, which interviewed 1,500 people, 85.5 percent of registered voters indicated they would vote in the upcoming election.
According to Statistica, a data-gathering platform, approximately 84 percent of eligible voters cast their ballot in the presidential election in August 2020.
It added that the capital, Minsk, recorded the lowest voter turnout at “over 66 percent”.
However, overseas Belarusians will be able to take part in the election only by returning to the country and casting a ballot at a regional polling station.
Who is running against Lukashenko?
According to the country’s Central Election Commission (CEC), four candidates have been registered to run.
Liberal Democrats chairman Oleg Gaidukevich announced his candidature in October, and told the First News Channel that there “must be healthy competition, discussion”.
Sergei Sirankov, first secretary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, is also on the ballot.
Anna Kanapatskaya, a former member of parliament who contested the 2020 presidential election, is also running; and Alexander Khizhnyak, chairman of the Republican Labour Party, is the fourth candidate.
However, Tatsiana Chulitskaya, a Belarusian academic at Vilnius University in Lithuania, told the Reuters news agency that no candidate had criticised Lukashenko during their campaign.
“These are not candidates in the normal meaning of this word. They are just playing in this campaign. They are not competing with Lukashenko,” she said in a phone interview.
What happened in 2020?
Following the August election, the CEC announced that Lukashenko had been re-elected and had won 80.1 percent of the vote, securing his victory over Tsikhanouskaya.
However, allegations of voter fraud spread like wildfire after some argued that counts by polling stations did not add up to the official count by the CEC, leading to opposition groups and Western governments accusing Lukashenko of stealing the election.
Due to the election results, largely peaceful mass protests erupted in Minsk, calling for Lukashenko to step down.
But protesters were met with an intense police crackdown and mass arrests, with Belarusian human rights group Viasna reporting this week that more than 3,270 people have been convicted of joining the 2020 protests.
Moreover, the group found that there are more than 1,200 political prisoners in the country. Lukashenko released 23 political prisoners last week in what state media referred to as a humanitarian gesture, apparently timed to coincide with the final days before the election.
Has the election received any backlash?
Tsikhanouskaya called on the West on X to reject the “illegitimate” election.
She told BBC News that the election is a “sham”, adding, “This is a military-style operation; a performance staged by the regime to hold on to power.”
But Tsikhanouskaya told Belarusians not to protest as they did in the last election, saying, “You have to keep safe until the real moment of possibility.”
At the same time, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on Wednesday to reject the election results.
“While reiterating their non-recognition of Mr Lukashenko as President and their position that the entire Belarusian regime is illegitimate, MEPs express their unwavering support for the Belarusian people in their pursuit of democracy, freedom and human rights,” a statement by the European Parliament read.
Last week, former United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the elections could not be free or fair in an “environment where censorship is ubiquitous and independent media outlets no longer exist”.
He added that the US condemned the Belarusian government’s attempts to “legitimise” the election.
