Alexander Lukashenko is on course to win a seventh five-year term as Belarusian president in Sunday’s election with 87.6 percent of the vote, according to an exit poll broadcast on state television.
Lukashenko, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been in power since 1994.
The United States and the European Union said during the election that it could not be free or fair because free media are banned in Belarus and all leading opposition figures have been jailed or forced to flee abroad.
The election commission said turnout was 81.5 percent, with 6.9 million people eligible to vote.
Lukashenko – a 70-year-old former collective farm boss – suppressed mass protests against his rule in 2020 and allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to invade Ukraine in 2022. The opposition and the West said Lukashenko rigged the last presidential vote and authorities cracked down. Over 1,000 people are still in jail over the protests.
All of Lukashenko’s political opponents are either in prison – some incommunicado – or in exile, along with tens of thousands of Belarusians who have fled since 2020.
“All our opponents and enemies should understand: do not hope, we will never repeat what happened in 2020,” Lukashenko said Friday during a carefully choreographed ceremony at a stadium in Minsk.
Most Belarusians have only distant memories of life in the landlocked country before Lukashenko, who was 39 when he won Belarus’ first national election since independence from the Soviet Union.
Criticism of the powerful is banned in Belarus. Most people Agence France-Presse spoke to in Minsk and other towns supported him, but were still afraid to give their surnames.
The other candidates running against Lukashenko have been chosen to give the election an air of democracy and few people know who they are.
“I will vote for Lukashenko because things have improved since he became president. [in 1994]said Alexey, a 42-year-old farmer from the small village of Gobechi in south-east Belarus who earns around €300 (£250) a month selling milk. Like many people in Belarus, he is troubled by the war in neighboring Ukraine. In 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine from several directions, including Belarus. The following year, Russia sent tactical nuclear weapons to the country, which borders NATO countries.
Alexey said he wanted “no war”.
The government’s narrative is that Lukashenko guaranteed law and order in Belarus, accusing the leaders of the 2020 street protests of sowing chaos.
The United Nations estimates that 300,000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020 – mostly to Poland and Lithuania – out of a population of nine million. They were not able to cast ballots, Belarus had ended voting from abroad.
Exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tskhanovskaya called the vote a “fraud” in an interview with AFP in January. Her husband, Sergei Tikhonovsky, has been incommunicado for almost a year. He urged opponents to get ready for an opportunity to transform their country but admitted “this was not the moment”.
While Lukashenko once carefully balanced his relationship between the EU and Moscow, since 2020 he has become politically and economically dependent on Russia.
The EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, called the election a “fraud” in a post on Saturday and said “Lukashenko has no justification”.
Known as “Europe’s last dictator” – a nickname he adopted – Lukashenko has retained much of the traditions and infrastructure of the Soviet Union, with the country’s economy largely state-planned.
Lukashenko scrapped Belarus’ white red-white flag in the 1990s – which has since become a symbol of the opposition.
