On January 26, Belarusians will forged their ballots in a presidential vote. Formally, there are 5 candidates, however 70-year-old Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, who has dominated the nation for greater than three many years, will nearly definitely retain his seat.
Whereas Vladimir Putin’s Russia tolerated a level of open dissent, at the very least till the invasion of Ukraine, Lukashenko was described for a few years as “Europe’s final dictator” – a fame which didn’t appear to faze him.
“I’m the final and solely dictator in Europe. Certainly, there are none wherever else on the planet,” he instructed Reuters in 2012.
Belarus’s opposition, america, the European Parliament and rights teams have dismissed the upcoming vote as a “sham”. The final presidential elections in 2020 kicked off mass protests amid widespread allegations of vote rigging, adopted by a brutal crackdown by the authorities.
Consultants and insiders say Lukashenko is pushed by a “thirst for energy” and, having been shaken by these demonstrations, the concern of shedding management.
“This want for energy has been driving him for 30 years. It doesn’t let him calm down for a second,” Valery Karbalevich, a political observer at Radio Liberty and creator of an unofficial biography of Lukashenko, instructed Al Jazeera. “Energy and life are the identical factor … and he doesn’t think about his life with out energy.”
Born in 1954 within the city of Kopys in northern Belarus, Lukashenko, a self-confessed troublemaker at college, was a Soviet pig farm supervisor earlier than turning into president. The chief, who at instances has made outlandish claims comparable to vodka and visits to the sauna having the ability to stop COVID, is ruthless and distrustful, observers and people who labored beneath him say.
“This man is able to giving an order to kill if somebody goes in opposition to him,” stated Pavel Latushka, Belarus’s now-exiled former minister of tradition from 2009 to 2012.
“I had a dialog with him the place he instructed me immediately: ‘Should you betray me, I’ll strangle you with my very own fingers.’ He later repeated this publicly in a current [2024] interview with Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov.”
As Belarus heads to the polls on Sunday, who’s the person behind the chief and what motivates him right now?
Soviet nostalgia
Belarus, a landlocked nation of just a little greater than 9 million bordering Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, was as soon as a part of the USSR. Like many leaders of former Soviet republics, Lukashenko’s political profession started throughout that interval. In contrast to them, nonetheless, Lukashenko didn’t embrace nationalism and was the only lawmaker in Soviet Belarus to vote in opposition to his nation’s independence in 1991.
Nostalgia for the Soviet period is mirrored in a lot of Lukashenko’s governance.
“He lived within the Soviet Union for greater than 30 years and now, he can’t transcend that life expertise,” stated Karbalevich.
Lukashenko, then 39, gained Belarus’s first, and thus far solely, presidential election deemed free and honest by exterior observers in 1994. The impartial candidate ran on a populist platform, pledging to root out corruption and railing in opposition to the “lawlessness” which he stated held the nation “hostage”. Instantly post-independence, Belarus suffered from a stagnating economic system, corruption, inflation and racketeering gangs.
Whereas it’s tough to pinpoint when precisely Lukashenko developed distrustful tendencies, or whether or not he at all times had them, he survived an assassination try on the marketing campaign path when his automotive got here beneath hearth by unknown assailants. A state tv documentary later claimed the attackers have been engaged on behalf of high-ranking officers.
Lukashenko gained roughly 80 p.c of the vote, defeating the nation’s first prime minister, Vyacheslav Kebich, who inherited the job after independence and beneath whom high quality of life had deteriorated.
Inside a yr of assuming workplace, Lukashenko held a referendum that modified Belarus’s white-and-red flag to 1 carefully resembling the previous Soviet design. He instructed World Struggle II veterans, “Now we have returned to you the nationwide flag of the nation for which you fought.”
He maintained a deliberate economic system, with state monopolies over trade and saved the collective farms open, successful the loyalty of the agricultural sector. This state-run economic system prevented the emergence of highly effective oligarchs dominating nationwide politics, in contrast to in Russia and Ukraine, though a handful of businessmen with hyperlinks to the federal government have prospered lately.
“In the beginning of his presidency, he was actually in style,” defined Karbalevich.
“He thought of himself the folks’s president and instructed totally different tales about how the general public cherished him.”
At a gathering of presidency officers in 2006, for instance, Lukashenko boasted how bedridden struggle veterans virtually stood as much as make their option to voting cubicles.
‘Afraid to look him within the eye’
Karbalevich believes that again then, Lukashenko had a imaginative and prescient and wished to go down in historical past as the person who “created the Belarusian statehood” and another mannequin to post-communist transition in different nations, however he additionally wished the state to manage the economic system.
To an extent, it proved environment friendly: in contrast to Russia, which was affected by poverty and organised crime within the Nineteen Nineties, Belarus was comparatively protected and the inequality hole was slim. The nation’s Gini coefficient – a wealth inequality measure – has maintained a greater stability than its neighbours and even elements of Western Europe.
All through, Lukashenko has tried to domesticate an affectionate, paternalistic picture as “Bat’ka” – the daddy of the nation. He’s frequently photographed participating in “subbotnik” – the Soviet observe of enterprise unpaid volunteer work on the weekends – for example, by serving to out on a farm. He enjoys sport and health, and projected a picture of a powerful, wholesome chief by enjoying hockey.
“Lukashenko enjoys night occasions,” stated Latushka, who labored immediately beneath the president throughout his time as a minister.
“He gathered key officers, journalists, sports activities and cultural figures for closed events on New 12 months’s, on the normal Outdated New 12 months [January 14]. At first, there was an open half, and later a closed one, which might final till 6, even till 7 within the morning, with a live performance programme in a Stalinist model when everybody sits on the desk and watches the artists. Lukashenko can drink at such occasions – even so much, after which he may even go dancing. This is part of his life hidden from society.”
However one other side of Lukashenko’s management rapidly grew to become obvious early in his rule.
“Worry. That’s the reason officers sit with their heads down throughout conferences with him,” Latushka stated.
“Everyone seems to be afraid to look him within the eye. It is a paternalistic system of energy. As quickly as he leaves, everybody’s heads will rise, everybody will begin speaking and performing in another way. In public, Lukashenko is outwardly a really merciless individual, able to publicly humiliating anybody. He doesn’t have in mind different folks’s factors of view.”
Consolidating energy
Inside two years of getting into workplace, Lukashenko engineered a constitutional referendum giving him management over parliament and the safety equipment. The opposition alleged widespread voting fraud, though it’s additionally doable part of the citizenry, cautious of the instability in neighbouring Russia, was certainly prepared to grant Lukashenko these powers.
Then in 2004, Lukashenko abolished presidential time period limits by one other such referendum, that means he might stand for election many times.
Uladzimir Zhyhar, a former detective and consultant of Belpol, a bunch of exiled ex-Belarusian law enforcement officials who defected to the opposition after the protests of 2020, accused legislation enforcement of being, at the start, henchmen for Lukashenko’s regime.
“That is the system he has cultivated for 30 years,” Zhyhar instructed Al Jazeera.
“After the anti-constitutional referendum of 1996, the police, courts, prosecutor’s workplace, investigative committee and, after all, particular companies, obey [Lukashenko]. There may be torture, there are unlawful arrests, there are interrogations … and the principle division for preventing organised crime, which if it issues politically motivated crimes, they’re allowed to do all the things. Completely all the things, no matter human rights or the rest.”
Between 1999 and 2000, 4 of Lukashenko’s political opponents went lacking (PDF): former Inside Minister Yury Zakharanka; lawmaker Viktar Hanchar and his good friend, businessman Anatol Krasowski; and journalist Dzmitry Zavadski. An exiled member of an elite unit concentrating on gangs in 2019 admitted to participating in three of their abductions and murders.
Lukashenko has appointed loyalists to senior positions, each throughout the safety forces and state-run industries. However evidently he doesn’t absolutely belief them.
“Lukashenko completely hates individuals who will be in some place of authority, and so he’s always engaged within the rotation of personnel,” Zhyhar defined. And whereas former safety personnel could occupy deputy positions at enterprises, they’re by no means – “as a rule” – appointed to prime posts.
“He’s afraid that this former safety operative, having sure data, having a sure authority, will be capable of kind connections and pose a menace to him.”
Between Moscow and the West
Early in his presidency, Lukashenko’s international coverage echoed the previous Soviet Union’s place throughout the Chilly Struggle. He railed in opposition to Western imperialism and travelled to Belgrade amid NATO bombing to assist Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic. He was additionally deeply invested in reintegration with Russia and in 1997 signed a Union State settlement with then-President Boris Yeltsin. Underneath phrases which have been by no means absolutely applied, Russia and Belarus would have re-united.
“Lukashenko had a want to unite with Russia into one state and to overcome it,” Karbalevich defined. “Then, within the Nineteen Nineties, Boris Yeltsin was unpopular in Russia as a president. He was previous and sick, and Lukashenko thought that he might defeat him at any democratic election. However then Putin got here to energy [in 1999], and Lukashenko misplaced curiosity in integration with Russia.”
The preliminary relations between Lukashenko and Putin have been “very, very tense”, added Vladzimir Astapenka, who served as a Belarusian diplomat to a number of Latin American nations within the 2010s. “They have been like rivals, and Putin did so much to maneuver Lukashenko again to the place he belongs.”
However, Lukashenko leveraged his place as one head of the nominal Union State to acquire concessions from Moscow. The Belarusian economic system relied closely on Russian subsidies of low-cost oil, which was refined in Belarus and resold in Ukraine and the EU. Russia, in the meantime, imported huge portions of Belarusian agricultural produce, comparable to milk and cheese.
Relations remained cordial however distant all through the 2010s, with Lukashenko quietly embracing a extra Belarusian id, even giving a speech in Belarusian in 2014 as an alternative of the customary Russian.
Nonetheless, Yauheni Preiherman of the Minsk Dialogue Council on Worldwide Relations assume tank, says Lukashenko has been profitable at dealing with his private relationship with Putin and Minsk’s with Moscow. “I typically name him the most effective Kremlinologist on the planet, as a result of whether or not we like him or not, his distinctive entry to Putin himself and the remainder of the Russian political elite makes him a really educated statesman in that regard,” he defined.
On the similar time, Lukashenko began reaching out to the West, for example, in 2008 and 2015 ordering the discharge of political prisoners, after which the European Union (EU) in flip lifted some sanctions it had imposed over Belarus’s inner repression.
On the onset of the struggle in japanese Ukraine in 2014, Belarus positioned itself as a impartial mediator, with Lukashenko flip-flopping over the query of the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Russia early within the battle.
The story you often discover within the mainstream Western media is “Lukashenko, the final dictator of Europe, being solely targeted on making certain his energy contained in the nation. That makes him ideologically near Putin, and that’s the tip of the story,” Preiherman defined.
However what will get ignored is a extra complicated actuality of his relationships with Russia and the West, he argues.
“With Russia, he has had each extra battle and cooperation, whereas with the European Union and the West, he has had much less of each. And that is simple to elucidate,” he stated. “It is because the construction of Belarus is far nearer to, and in lots of respects depending on, Russia.”
In 2019, the still-unresolved matter of the Union State manifested itself in a diplomatic disaster. Putin wished to push forward with reintegration, however Lukashenko warned any such motion by Moscow can be interpreted as hostile, and the Kremlin fired again by slicing its oil subsidies.
The subsequent yr all the things modified.
‘Enacting vengeance’ in opposition to protesters
Within the presidential elections of 2020, Lukashenko claimed victory with greater than 80 p.c of the vote, a poll that was extensively considered by the opposition as rigged.
A whole lot of hundreds of individuals poured into the streets within the largest mass protests ever seen in Belarus. They have been met by truncheon-wielding riot squads. About 35,000 have been arrested, and hundreds have been allegedly beaten or tortured in custody. As much as as many as 15 protesters have been killed throughout or within the aftermath of the unrest, and at the very least one particular person was raped in custody.
“For the primary time, he misplaced,” Zhyhar stated.
“He misplaced informationally. He misplaced on the road, as a result of hundreds of individuals went out and lined up in a sequence of solidarity. He misplaced, actually, even on the elections themselves, as a result of everybody noticed the queues that have been lined as much as vote for [opposition candidate Sviatlana] Tsikhanouskaya. Everybody noticed it.”
“The authoritarian regime has change into totalitarian,” Karbalevich stated. “It’s forbidden to criticise Lukashenko. It’s forbidden to doubt the correctness of the state line. If an individual is discovered [doing that] in social networks, she or he is detained for this. Lukashenko’s behaviour has modified. The political system has change into extra inflexible.
“Lukashenko is traumatised by the occasions of 2020. Now, he’s cruelly enacting vengeance on the Belarusians who protested in opposition to him.”
There are at the moment greater than 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus, at the very least 10 of whom are held in solitary confinement. They embrace Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski, chairman of the Viasna Human Rights Centre, and Sergei Tikhanovsky, husband of Tsikhanouskaya who now leads the exiled opposition from Lithuania.
“Lukashenko is nicely conscious that not all of the folks in opposition to him have left the nation, and he didn’t imprison everybody. And due to this fact, for 4 and a half years, we have now been repressed,” Zhyhar stated.
“Now we have no impartial media, we have now no impartial commerce unions, we have now no impartial NGOs, we have now no impartial courts, we have now no impartial legislation enforcement businesses. And most significantly, Lukashenko continues to be afraid of the folks. Subsequently, he doesn’t cut back repression, he solely will increase it.”
Hostage of his personal system
The aftermath of the 2020 protests burned Lukashenko’s bridges with the West, as america, United Kingdom and EU imposed sanctions, whereas Putin supported him.
“The sanctions, after they have been initially adopted, have been proclaimed as a way to power Lukashenko and his authorities to minimize home repression, free prisoners, and launch an inclusive inner dialogue along with his opponents,” stated Preiherman.
However on all these counts, the state of affairs is far worse, he says. They’ve additionally created unintended penalties. “Lukashenko has had subsequent to zero manoeuvring area in relations with Russia, [and] geopolitically, they’ve ensured that Russia is the one sport on the town,” he added.
The protests offered Lukashenko with a dilemma: share energy with the folks, or with Putin, displays Karbalevich.
“He agreed to share energy with Putin … Now folks within the West assume that Lukashenko just isn’t an impartial statesman, that Putin is the actual grasp of Belarus and Lukashenko is simply his puppet. I’d not be so radical; Lukashenko is sort of autonomous. However right now, this union with Belarus and Russia may be very shut.”
From February 2022, though he didn’t deploy troops within the battle, Lukashenko allowed Russia to make use of Belarusian territory to launch the invasion of Ukraine. In the course of the 2023 revolt by the Russian mercenary Wagner Group, Lukashenko acted as mediator between Putin and chief mutineer Yevgeny Prigozhin, permitting him to be portrayed as a peacemaker.
“From being rivals they grew to become … I wouldn’t say pals, however allies,” Astapenka, the previous diplomat, stated.
“And Putin wants Lukashenko to manage Belarus.”
Final January, Lukashenko signed a legislation stopping opposition leaders overseas from standing in presidential elections and granting himself lifetime immunity from felony prosecution, and lifelong assist for himself and his household, ought to he retire.
“To an extent, he grew to become a hostage of the system that he himself created,” Karbalevich stated.
“He couldn’t depart energy even when he wished to. He’s afraid for his life, for his freedom, and due to this fact he’ll maintain on to his energy to the tip.”
