The acclamation of Alexander Lukashenko as Belarus president for a seventh straight term was confirmed on January 26. The electoral authorities announced that the man known as “Europe’s last dictator” – the only president the country has had since it held its first “democratic” election in 1994 – had won 87% of the vote.
Most western leaders have dismissed the result as a “sham”. Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, posted on X that “the people of Belarus had no choice”, while the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, commented that he was surprised “only” 87.6% of the electorate had voted for Lukashenko: “Will the rest fit inside the prisons?” he asked.
But the result was never really in doubt. Sikorski’s barb about jailing opponent figures is right on the money. Many of Belarus’s main opposition figures are already behind bars and the rest are in exile. And, just to make sure of things, well before the campaign started – in January 2024 – Lukashenko changed the law so that only those people who were had lived permanently in Belarus for 20 years could stand for the presidency. This meant that the most prominent opposition leader not now in prison in Belarus, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, was ineligible.
