Belarus is about to hold its sixth presidential election on Aug. 9. Incumbent Alexander Lukashenko has won all the previous votes — and all but the first were deemed unfair.
This time around, the country’s long-ruling dictator will once again “officially” win the elections, but he may lose the country in the process.
Unprecedented public upheaval, multi-kilometer lines in support of opposition candidates and astonishing police brutality to suppress them are the themes of the upcoming elections.
Opposition to Lukashenko’s regime comes from all sides, with his main competitors being a pro-Russian banker, the wife of a YouTube video blogger and a former long-time government official.
The banker and the video blogger were soon arrested and are being kept behind bars, sparking more protests and, thus, more arrests.
“The brutality of the regime was sparked by the unprecedented public upheaval, and an unprecedented threat to the regime,” Vitali Shkliarov, political strategist and visiting scholar at Harvard University, told the Kyiv Post.
Now hundreds of protesters are being held behind bars, while thousands of people on the street mock Lukashenko by calling him a cockroach and pointing out his seemingly low electoral support.
Belarusian journalist Liubou Luniova told the Kyiv Post that Lukashenko has found himself in a lose-lose scenario.
“No matter what he does now, it’ll be the wrong decision.”
Anyone but him
Often called “the last dictator of Europe,” Lukashenko has held office since 1994.
By changing the constitution twice during his 26-year presidency, Lukashenko made the process of legally challenging him at the ballot box an impossible task.
Previously, each election followed the same pattern — the president received over 80% of the vote against handpicked opponents, people who took to the streets were swiftly chased down and opposition leaders demanding fair elections were imprisoned.
Some of the people vocal in their opposition to Lukashenko disappeared and were never found.
But months before the 2020 elections, Lukashenko’s seemingly unshakable authority cracked.
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Lukashenko’s mishandling of the COVID‑19 pandemic, economic downturn and general fatigue with the aging dictator made elections a legal way to express dissatisfaction in an otherwise authoritarian state.
In Belarus, a country of 9.5 million people, a candidate must gather 100,000 signatures to be included on the presidential ballot. The signatures must be collected in a month’s time.
Such a high threshold meant that independent candidates had little to no chances to run for office. But they were not banned from trying.
Fourteen candidates registered to run for office, and getting in line to sign in support of an opposition candidate became a form of protest.
“Those people who stand in multi-kilometer lines, after signing in support of one candidate, they often go and line up for another candidate,” says Shkliarov.
“It’s a sign that people just won’t change,” he adds.
Three main candidates — Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Viktor Babariko and Valery Tsepkalo — were all able to collect the required signatures in an unprecedented fashion.
People standing in line held red and white national flags, banned by Lukashenko, and chanted anti-Lukashenko slogans. The most popular one compared Lukashenko to a cockroach with a moustache and carrying old slippers.
“Slam the cockroach,” protesters shouted.
The meme was popularized by YouTube blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, whose wife is now running for the presidency. Tikhanovsky was being held behind bars when candidates were obligated to apply, so his wife registered as a candidate instead.
Tikhanovsky became her campaign manager and hosted rallies to collect signatures until he was once again imprisoned on May 29.
The gathering of signatures officially ended on June 19, with all three main opposition candidates collecting more then enough to be present on the ballot. Babariko alone was able to collect 425,000 signatures — that’s nearly 7% of the voting-age population.
“People made their dissatisfaction clear,” says Luniova
“It was never about policy, it was about anyone but him.”
Presidential harassment
After protests erupted nationwide — and protest lines became a regular feature the Belarusian streets — the police began cracking down, first on candidates and then on protesters as well.
Tikhanovsky was arrested while campaigning in the provincial capital of Grodno. According to video footage, a woman was following the blogger and demanding that he speak to her. After Tikhanovsky declined, she called the nearby police and Tikhanovsky was arrested.
Seven members of Tikhanovsky’s campaign were also arrested.
Now Tikhanovsky is being held in solitary confinement and is charged with flagrantly disrupting public order, which carries a maximum sentence of up to 3 years in prison. Tikhanovsky and his supporters call the arrest a staged act and part of the ongoing campaign of politically motivated prosecutions.
Soon the authorities turned their attention to Babariko.
Since 2000, Babariko headed BelGazpromBank, the country’s fourth largest bank by assets, owned by Russian energy company Gazprom. Babariko left his post in May to run for office.
On June 11, the state cracked down on the bank, arresting 15 of the bank’s current and former top managers. Three members of Babariko’s campaign were also arrested.
A week later, Babariko and his son Eduard, who led his campaign, were arrested by the Belarusian KGB. They are being held behind bars and are now charged in what appears to be a money laundering case.
Viktor Babaryko, former head of Belgazprombank, holds a press conference in Minsk on June 11, 2020. (AFP)
The charges haven’t been made public, and Babariko’s lawyer has been prevented from seeing his client. Officially, the lawyer is not allowed to meet with Babariko because of the ongoing COVID‑19 pandemic — the same pandemic that Lukashenko called a hoax.
“Masks are off, not only from the puppets that we had here, but also from the puppeteers who sit outside Belarus,” said Lukashenko two days after Babariko’s arrest.
A day prior, Babariko’s campaign fund was frozen.
Government-controlled television channels began a campaign against Babariko long before his arrest, hinting that he’s a Russian agent because he worked for Gazprom’s bank.
Lukashenko has also accused Russia of meddling in Belarus’ elections. The Belarusian dictator’s relationship with Russia has been strained since 2019, when the Kremlin used its economic power over Belarus to force the country into deeper integration with Russia.
In 1999, the two countries officially created a Union State, which remains a formality to this day.
The European Union called on Lukashenko to release both Tikhanovsky and Babariko and to allow the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to monitor the upcoming elections. The EU has promised a new round of sanctions on Belarus.
Lukashenko doesn’t care and directly states that there won’t be any democracy under his watch.
“If I behave democratically and show that I am warm and fuzzy, I have a chance of losing the country,” Lukashenko said on June 20.
Imprisonment and torture
Soon after Babariko’s arrest, people took to the streets en mass.
On June 19, the last day of the official signature gathering period, people all over the country gathered in lines spanning several kilometers to demand Babariko’s release.
Massive arrests followed. The police, the KGB and men without insignia began grabbing people on the streets. Videos of people being choked and dragged into police trucks spread over the internet.
Mobile internet was also shut down in downtown for at least two hours.
People who openly expressed their dissatisfaction with the regime were fired and harassed on national television.
A doctor from Lida, a small town in Belarus, told Tikhanovsky in May that his town lacks basic protective equipment during the ongoing pandemic. He was later arrested. held for seven days behind bars and was fired from his job.
An 81-year-old retiree who told Tikhanovsky that Belarus must get rid of “the cockroach” was investigated by the KGB. On ONT television channel, the head of the KGB said that the elderly woman’s family has two houses in provincial Grodno, hinting that she’s no ordinary Belarusian pensioner.
The Belarusian authorities are used to unconventional methods when squelching protesters. In 2011, when protesters silently gathered on the streets and clapped in support of political prisoners, the government banned clapping in public.
But while Belarus may at times seem like a caricature of a tin-pot dictatorship, the situation is grim for those jailed in their struggle against the regime. According to Viasna, a local non-governmental human rights group, over 650 people were arrested since the beginning of the campaign. Over 100 people received prison sentences.
According to Luniova, political prisoners are mistreated while in prisons. She says many were not given mattresses, were forced to sleep on the floor in facilities that lacked proper sanitation and were denied legal representation.
Notable examples include Tikhanovsky, who is kept in solitary confinement, and Babariko, who is denied access to his lawyer. Luniova points out the case of Pavel Severynets, a prominent opposition leader, who cut himself because of unbearable confinement conditions.
Severynets, who was arrested on June 8, will be kept behind bars at least until September.
No way out
In the current system, there is no hope that elections will be free and fair, yet there’s also no hope that the situation will go back to how it was prior to the campaign.
In Belarus, for candidates to appear on the ballot, they must be vetted prior the official election campaign. The signatures the candidates collected must also be checked by the Central Electoral Commission for authenticity.
The commission is headed by Lidia Yermoshina, who took the job in 1996. Under her watch, four presidential elections took place — all deemed fraudulent by the EU.
In a June 16 interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda Belarus, Yermoshina said that “Tikhanovsky’s group used the collection of signatures to change the government,” which is apparently illegal in Belarus during elections.
Yermoshina also said she had sued Tikhanovsky.
Which candidates will be denied registration will be known no later than July 14.
“Looking at how Lukashenko is acting, he chose a tough stance — punishing the politically active and not negotiating,” says Shkliarov.
“From this point of view, the (main opposition) candidates won’t be registered,” Shkliarov adds.
Regardless of what happens, it has become clear that a lot of people in Belarus want to see Lukashenko gone.
In Belarus, there are no public pollsters. Gathering any kind of information without government approval is illegal, meaning that it’s impossible to find out Lukashenko’s true level of support.
In April, a government-approved poll leaked online. It showed that Lukashenko enjoyed a 24% support rate in Minsk before the COVID‑19 pandemic and massive arrests.
In a June 18 interview with the Narodna Volya website, Gennady Korshunov, head of the Institute of Sociology at the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, confirmed that the leaked information was correct.
He also confirmed that the Central Electoral Commission enjoyed only 11% trust in March.
With no independent information about Lukashenko’s true level of support, opposition websites and television channels conducted their own unofficial polls. Most showed that Lukashenko enjoyed the support of just 3–6%.
Protesters on the street began shouting “Sasha 3 percent,” using a nickname for Alexander in Russian.
“There was never such a massive protest, there was never such a high number of people willing to sign for candidates, there were never 2–3-kilometer lines of people waiting to sign for the opposition,” says Shkliarov.
“Regardless of whether Lukashnko will win the elections, a certain process has begun and there is no turning back.”
