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Belarus exit polls show victory for ‘last dictator in Europe’

The results of the election will be announced by the Central Election Commission not later than 10 days after the voting is held.

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This will be the fifth term of the Belurussian president who has governed the country for more than 20 years.

Critics have accused the president and his supporters of preventing the main opposition parties from building any public profile and restricting their access to the all-powerful state-owned media.

Mr Lukashenko appeared at the polling station with son Nikolai, who was wearing the same suit and tie as his father.

The European Union will lift its sanctions on Belarus, including those on Lukashenko, 61, for four months after Sunday’s vote, barring any last-minute crackdown, diplomatic sources said on Friday.

Belarus’ role in mediating Ukrainian, Russian and rebel forces this year – which resulted in February’s Minsk peace agreement – has also been looked upon favorably by the West.

Conde is hoping to win at the first round, avoiding a “run-off” election with his closest rival, but his opponents contend this feat would be impossible without vote-rigging.

The win for Lukashenko, whose iron grip on society earned him the sobriquet of “Europe’s last dictator”, was a foregone conclusion in a campaign wholly devoid of intrigue.

On the eve of the election, the newly-crowned victor of the 205 Nobel Literature Prize, Svetlana Alexievich, warned Europe to beware of Lukashenko, describing his regime as a “soft dictatorship”.

Rally participants carried placards reading “Stop Lukashenko” and “They have stolen the election from us”.

“This may help Lukashenko in his quest for more acceptance in the West as he is increasingly wary of his country being seen in the world as a small tail which Russian Federation wags”.

“That would mean that people were beginning to move away and were dissatisfied with a few of my policies”, the president said after voting in Minsk.

“The government has falsified even the ballot form which contains not a single name of an opposition candidate”, Nikolai Statkevich, a former political prisoner who ran against Lukashenko in the 2010 presidential election, told a rally in Minsk on Saturday evening. “We all suspect that for Lukashenko it doesn’t matter how we will vote, what is important is those who will count the ballots, and so there will be no surprise”, she said.

At 4 pm (1300 GMT) on Sunday, the turnout was nearly 75 percent, the central electoral commission said.

An independent institute of socio-economic and political research put Lukashenko’s support at about 46 percent in September, while the official state sociology institute tallied his support at 76 percent.

The proposal has sparked an outcry from opposition figures who have spent years protesting Lukashenko’s authoritarian ways.

More than 6% of voters voted against all candidates.

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“We don’t need any bases”, he told reporters, stressing Belarus’s membership in a Moscow-led security bloc.

Belarus kicks off presidential election