Voting underway in Belarus to extend Lukashenko’s 30-year rule. election news
Longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko is set to win for the seventh time as he is unopposed by genuine challengers.
Voting is underway in Belarus in a presidential election in which longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko is expected to remain in power for more than three decades in the absence of any real opposition.
Voters head to the polls in Minsk at 8 a.m. local time on Sunday in the first presidential election since Lukashenko crushed mass protests against his government in 2020 and allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to invade Ukraine in 2022. (05:00 GMT) Voting started.
The 70-year-old former collective farm boss has been in power in Belarus since 1994 and is seeking a seventh term.
The country’s last presidential election in 2020 ended with nationwide protests, unprecedented in the history of the country of nine million people. The opposition and Western countries accused Lukashenko of election rigging and imposed sanctions.
In response, his government launched a widespread crackdown, jailing more than 1,000 people, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bieliatsky, founder of the Viasna Human Rights Center.
The United Nations estimates that about 300,000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020 – mostly to Poland and Lithuania. They will not be able to vote, Belarus has canceled voting abroad.
“All our opponents and enemies must understand: do not hope, we will never repeat what we did in 2020,” Lukashenko said during a ceremony at a stadium in Minsk on Friday.
‘Europe’s last dictator’
Lukashenko’s harsh rule, which began two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has earned him the nickname “Europe’s last dictator” – which he embraces – while relying on subsidies and political support from close ally Russia.
The four candidates running against Lukashenko have been chosen to give the elections an atmosphere of democracy and few people know who they are. They are loyal to him and praise his rule.
“I am entering the race not against, but together with Lukashenko, and I will serve as his leader,” said Sergei Syrankov, a Communist Party candidate who favors criminalizing LGBTQ activities and reconstructing monuments to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Ready to do.”
Candidate Alexander Khiznyak, head of the Republican Party of Labor and Justice, headed to a voting precinct in Minsk in 2020 and promised to prevent a “repetition of the disturbances”.
Oleg Gaidukevich, head of the Liberal Democratic Party, endorsed Lukashenko in 2020 and urged fellow candidates to “harass Lukashenko’s enemies”.
A fourth challenger, Hanna Kanapatskaya, actually received 1.7 percent of the vote in 2020 and says she is “the only democratic alternative to Lukashenko,” promising to lobby to free political prisoners but calling supporters “extreme initiatives.” “Warns against.
The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas called the election a “sham” and said “Lukashenko has no legitimacy” in a post on Twitter.
