Global monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were less scathing than usual in their election assessment.
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A parliamentary election is under way in Belarus, but opposition parties not represented in the chamber for 20 years are sceptical of their chances.
Announcing the results for three of Belarus’s seven regions, the election commission chief, Lidia Yermoshina, said Anna Konopatskaya, a member of opposition party United Civil Party, had won a place in the 110-seat parliament.
“I want the opposition to exist and be constructive”, Lukashenko told reporters after casting his vote in the company of his twelve-year-old son Nikolai.
Despite the authorities’ widely touted liberalization of the election process, Belarus’ latest legislative contest proceeded much like previous ones: Most independent candidates were blocked from participating, and prison inmates as well as patients in mental health institutions were able to vote by means of absentee ballots. “For the Belarussian authorities, this election is more an issue of foreign than domestic policy”, said Denis Melyantsov, senior analyst at the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies.
President Lukashenko has been in power since 1994, keeping the country strategically close to Russian Federation.
While Russia has clashed with the European Union and USA over its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and what the western nations say is its support for anti-government rebels in that country’s east, Lukashenko has won plaudits from some leaders for hosting the main talks aimed at finding a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Critics say tight restrictions on campaigning and state control of the news media inhibit a genuinely free election in Belarus. There are also concerns that the state could manipulate the results through early balloting, since ballot boxes were left unguarded during the five days of early voting.
The London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said this week it will resume direct cooperation with Belarusian authorities for the first time since 1996 as the country has become more “internationally open”. “Opposition (figures) were not thrown in prison”.
The main opposition parties did not take part in the last parliamentary elections in 2012, which global observers said had been neither free nor fair.
Lukashenko, a man once dubbed “Europe’s last dictator”, is now eager to curry a limited amount of favor with the West in order to get help for his country’s ailing economy.
After the 2012 parliament elections, the OSCE called for such measures including increasing transparency of the vote count and improving rights of free expression. About 25 percent of the electorate cast ballots early, according to the commission.
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Anna Konopatskaya, a jurist of the opposition – Party of Popular Unity – won in one of the districts of the capital.
