Skip to main content Skip to navigation

How to steal an election

Paul Hansbury

WUB Hub Research Fellow

 

A longer version of this text was published on the author’s website under a different title.

 

Protesters face riot police in 2020

Belarus’s dictator Alyaksandr Lukashenka has been in power for more than 30 years: on Sunday he will claim a seventh term as president; the outcome is barely in doubt. He has held on to power for so long through a combination of Machiavellian talent, a degree of support and a run of luck. In 2020, the last presidential election, it looked as if his instincts had failed him and that his luck had run out; huge street protests nearly swept him from power.

The 2020 vote had been blatantly rigged. A few days after the voting evidence of burnt ballot papers appeared online, preventing a re-count (if the votes had been counted in the first place). Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians protested against the election fraud and a brutal crackdown by the state followed. Police used rubber bullets, water cannon and even live rounds, wounding hundreds of citizens and killing at least five people either during the protests or in detention. Police arrested thousands of protesters, many of whom were tortured in detention centres.

 

Profilaktika

The crackdown continues to this day. Lukashenka menacingly promised to ‘find everyone’ who had joined street rallies and facial recognition technology was later used to that end. Human rights groups recognise at least 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus as of early 2025, with 3,697 individuals identified as political prisoners since 2020. The actual number is higher still because some prisoners ask not to be so labelled, fearing that it will lead to harsher treatment of them behind bars. The state has cowed private enterprise and civil society; the Belarusian diaspora has swelled massively as citizens fled for safety.

Citizens are still being arrested and imprisoned for their participation in protests that took place more than four years ago. Belarusians returning to the country after a period abroad risk being detained at the border. In recent weeks law enforcement officers have targeted anyone they consider potentially disloyal. They have searched the homes of individuals who worked as independent election observers in the 2020 election in a campaign of intimidation intended as a prophylactic against any criticism next weekend.

The state security services have also targeted people using online chat services; a medium that allowed mass mobilisation of society in the 2020 protests. Such preventive policing (profilaktika) was a widespread practice during the Soviet era. Everything possible is being done to prevent expressions of dissent.

 

Bend Sinister

Accordingly, the 2025 election process is being managed with great care. No one outside the country will be able to vote, leaving the hundreds-of-thousands-strong diaspora disenfranchised. For those inside Belarus, Lukashenka’s administration has organised shows of support in the form of 'flash-mobs' and concert events.

Alongside Lukashenka’s name, the ballot paper lists four other candidates, none of whom is a genuine opponent. Hanna Kanapatskaya, standing as an independent candidate, did at least belong to an oppositional political party in the past. More recently, however, she has taken to criticising actual opponents of Lukashenka, who are excluded from the election, and looks even meeker than she did when she stood, also as an independent, in the 2020 election.

Aleh Haidukevich of the pro-governmental Liberal Democratic Party also played a small part in the 2020 election, until he withdrew his candidacy in favour of Lukashenka. In his current campaign he has continued to criticise street protests and praise Lukashenka. The Communist Party candidate, Siarhei Syrankau, fully endorses a Lukashenka victory, describing the dictator as 'a communist' who has brought socialism to Belarus. While Alyaksandr Khizhnyak of the Republican Party for Labour and Justice also advocates for many of Lukashenka's policies. Both Syrankau and Khizhnyak’s parties are also loyal to Lukashenka.

The candidates may have divergent opinions on some issues, but the differences are negligible: they hardly offer an alternative political programme. It makes more sense to see these ‘candidates’ as being used by the regime to engage different segments of the population and wheedle them into accepting the incumbent's re-election. It is an election without any opposition. Such is the pseudo-politics of Belarus today.

 

Luka’s luck

In the past, Lukashenka has ridden his luck. The controversial 9 September 2001 presidential election is a good example. Lukashenka used a revised constitution to jerrymander an election date two years after it was due. International observers deemed the election neither free nor fair but terrorist attacks on the United States, two days after the Belarus vote, meant Lukashenka faced little scrutiny.

There will be no properly independent election monitoring of this weekend’s vote. On 17 January the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that it had invited the OSCE to send an observer mission but it did so far too late for the OSCE to dispatch a team to Belarus. Instead, only loyal observers from 'Belarus-friendly' organisations are on hand, and they will inevitably praise the conduct of the election. To rub in how unwanted an OSCE mission is, the CIS Inter-Parliamentary Assembly mission deployed weeks ago, allowing it to watch the campaigning and early voting.

Lukashenka hopes next weekend's election will show that the election cycle has rolled on from 2020 and allow him to re-legitimise himself. The decision to hold the election in late January almost certainly had the timing of the United States presidential inauguration in mind. That may have been a conscious choice, yet there is an element of luck in so far as Donald Trump’s antics are keeping the spectacle of US politics undimmed.

Lukashenka may hope that the global media will be too preoccupied following the new president in the United States to turn an eye to Belarus. And few European leaders will congratulate Lukashenka on victory in any case. But he is not invincible and sometimes autocrats fall without a global media fanfare.

 

The author thanks Tatsiana Chulitskaya for contributing to this post.

Photo: Belarusian protesters facing riot police in August 2020, after the last presidential election. Photo by Andrew Keymaster, via Unsplash.