Belarus: the dictator’s last stand?
Belarus’s autocratic leader never has been a “stickler for accurate vote counting”, said Andrew Higgins in The New York Times. Aleksandr Lukashenko – known as “Europe’s last dictator” – has openly admitted falsifying past presidential elections. Yet in claiming a sixth victory in his repressive 26-year rule, it seems he has gone too far. After a ballot on 9 August, Lukashenko claimed an implausibly high 80% of the vote, while awarding his popular challenger, former English teacher Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, just 10.1%. The rigged poll sparked a wave of anger, and the biggest protests in Belarus’s history. In the capital, Minsk, and other cities, protesters were met with a “shockingly brutal” response. Riot police pummelled them as they lay on the ground, and fired “volley after volley of rubber bullets and stun grenades into peaceful, unarmed crowds”. Two people have died in the unrest, including one in police custody. Five days after the poll, almost 7,000 people had been arrested. But the clampdown hasn’t quelled the rage; last weekend, some 200,000 people joined mass protests in Minsk to demand Lukashenko’s resignation, leaving him “fighting for his political life” – and turning to neighbouring Russia for support.
Tikhanovskaya, his rival, has fled the country, said Christina Hebel in Der Spiegel (Hamburg). She had been an accidental candidate in the first place, only standing after her husband, a well-known opposition blogger, was jailed to stop him taking his place on the ballot. When she went to challenge the election result last week, she was detained by authorities for seven hours. They told her that her husband would be harmed and that she would be imprisoned herself – leaving her two children orphans – if she continued campaigning. In an obviously staged video released afterwards, Tikhanovskaya, 37, read from a sheet and warned people to stop protesting. She was later taken by Belarusian security forces to Lithuania, where she is in hiding with her children, having seen “no choice” but to leave her homeland. Many who stayed have been tortured, said
Le Point (Paris). After their release, protesters have claimed they were beaten with batons, subjected to electric shocks, deprived of food and water and burned with cigarettes in grossly overcrowded cells. Us journalists were targeted too, said Roman Godun in Belorusy i rynok (Minsk). Scores have been detained while covering protests, often being dragged into police vans where they can be pinned face-down, beaten and robbed.
But the crackdown has only intensified the protesters’ anger, said Irina Khalip in Novaya Gazeta (Moscow). Emboldened by their number, they refuse to be intimidated: they are bravely, calmly demanding peaceful change. When the regime blocked access to internet sites, techsavvy protesters simply used Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, to coordinate instead. Lukashenko’s plunging popularity is partly down to his incompetent handling of the coronavirus crisis, said Frank Nienhuysen in Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich): he labelled lockdowns a “psychosis” and talked up vodka as a cure, leaving many voters disillusioned. In the past he has overcome crises by appealing to either the West or Russia for help – often playing one off against the other. But that may not work now. Brussels is expected to slap sanctions on the regime after its response to the protests, and cosying up to Vladimir Putin risks pulling Belarus further into Moscow’s orbit.
Dictators like Lukashenko hardly ever give up power without a “bloody fight”, said Artyom Shraibman in The Moscow Times. And there’s a chance that these current protests will “fizzle out under pressure from security services”. Nonetheless, something fundamental has changed in Belarus. The protests will have inflicted “serious psychological damage” on Lukashenko, and are politicising people who were once disengaged. More people will likely choose to emigrate, worsening the economic stagnation of the past decade. Reliant on security forces for survival, and frozen out on the international stage, Lukashenko now has less room for manoeuvre than ever before.