Belausian President Alexander Lukashenko is set to claim victory for a fifth term, marking more than 20 years of semi-autocratic rule.
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The presidential election will be considered valid if over 50% of the poll come to vote. Official results were expected early Monday.
Mr Lukashenko’s re-election five years ago led to mass protests and the imprisonment of leading opposition figures, but support for his 20-year regime has risen since he cast himself as a guarantor of stability in the face of economic crisis and a pro-Russian separatist conflict in neighbouring Ukraine.
“No one doubts that Lukashenko will win…”
“The polls close at 8:00 pm and I advise you to follow the law”, he said.
The political opposition in Belarus appears to be weak at the moment because it is fractured and fears street protests because of the recent violent power transition in neighboring Ukraine. This was despite a boycott by the opposition supported by Nobel prize winning author Svetlana Alexeivich.
Last time a presidential election was held in Belarus – in 2010 – seven of the nine presidential candidates were arrested.
Still, there was a palpable sense of apathy about the election in a country that has seen little change since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
While Lukashenko did not officially campaign, he is in any case ubiquitous on state media. Dissenters have been fired from state-owned companies or dismissed from universities. Sunday’s vote drew heavily on the tradition of Soviet elections, where issues like equal ballot access and transparent counts take a backseat to its importance as a ritual underscoring national unity. “I don’t know anything about it”, Lukashenko said in a report released by the official state news agency, Belta.
Poroshenko has been a de facto ambassador for Belarus in the West and has worked to rehabilitate Lukashenko, according to Dmitry Bolkunets, an expert on Belarus at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, who also compared the friendship to Lukashenko’s brief association with Georgia’s then-President Mikheil Saakashvili after Russian Federation and Georgia fought a brief war in 2008.
Flanked by his ever-present 11-year-old son Nikolai, Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s “last dictator” was in confident mood on Sunday.
“This time it’s a really shameless fraud”, said Mr Sannikov, who ran as an opposition candidate in 2010, but was beaten up and jailed for two years after the election.
HE IS only 11 but has already met the Pope, posed for photographs with President Barack Obama, presided over military parades and attended speeches by world leaders at the United Nations general assembly.
European foreign ministers have said they will suspend sanctions against Belarus today, provided the vote passed without incident.
The people of Belarus have begun voting for their next president.
Such actions led Washington to refer to Belarus as “Europe’s last dictatorship”. The Central Election Commission organised 49 polling stations overseas, including four in Russian Federation.
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Nina Kozalova, 77, wasn’t falling for the bright lights and free concerts, however. What’s good about Lukashenko? “I have nothing against Batka but I wanted someone younger”, she said, using Lukashenko’s nickname, meaning father. “As soon as he gets money from Europe, he’ll go back to hating us again and doing whatever he likes”.
