On January 26, Belarusians will solid 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 a long time, will nearly actually retain his seat.
Whereas Vladimir Putin’s Russia tolerated a level of open dissent, not less than till the invasion of Ukraine, Lukashenko was described for a few years as “Europe’s final dictator” – a status 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, the US, 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.
Specialists and insiders say Lukashenko is pushed by a “thirst for energy” and, having been shaken by these demonstrations, the worry of dropping management.
“This want for energy has been driving him for 30 years. It doesn’t let him loosen up for a second,” Valery Karbalevich, a political observer at Radio Liberty and writer 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 in school, was a Soviet pig farm supervisor earlier than changing into president. The chief, who at instances has made outlandish claims corresponding 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,” mentioned 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 instantly: ‘Should you betray me, I’ll strangle you with my very own palms.’ He later repeated this publicly in a latest [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 in the present day?
Soviet nostalgia
Belarus, a landlocked nation of somewhat 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. Not like them, nevertheless, 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 not transcend that life expertise,” mentioned Karbalevich.
Lukashenko, then 39, received Belarus’s first, and up to now 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 mentioned held the nation “hostage”. Instantly post-independence, Belarus suffered from a stagnating economic system, corruption, inflation and racketeering gangs.
Whereas it’s troublesome 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 fireplace by unknown assailants. A state tv documentary later claimed the attackers have been engaged on behalf of high-ranking officers.
Lukashenko received 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 at least one carefully resembling the outdated Soviet design. He instructed World Struggle II veterans, “We’ve got returned to you the nationwide flag of the nation for which you fought.”
He maintained a deliberate economic system, with state monopolies over business and stored 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.
“Firstly of his presidency, he was actually widespread,” defined Karbalevich.
“He thought-about himself the folks’s president and instructed totally different tales about how the general public beloved him.”
At a gathering of presidency officers in 2006, for instance, Lukashenko boasted how bedridden battle 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 secure and the inequality hole was slender. The nation’s Gini coefficient – a wealth inequality measure – has maintained a greater steadiness than its neighbours and even components 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 collaborating in “subbotnik” – the Soviet apply of enterprise unpaid volunteer work on the weekends – as an 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,” mentioned Latushka, who labored instantly beneath the president throughout his time as a minister.
“He gathered key officers, journalists, sports activities and cultural figures for closed events on New Yr’s, on the normal Previous New Yr [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 type when everybody sits on the desk and watches the artists. Lukashenko can drink at such occasions – even rather a lot, 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 turned obvious early in his rule.
“Worry. That’s the reason officers sit with their heads down throughout conferences with him,” Latushka mentioned.
“Everyone seems to be afraid to look him within the eye. This can be a paternalistic system of energy. As quickly as he leaves, everybody’s heads will rise, everybody will begin speaking and appearing in another way. In public, Lukashenko is outwardly a really merciless particular person, able to publicly humiliating anybody. He doesn’t take into consideration different folks’s factors of view.”
Consolidating energy
Inside two years of moving 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 keen to grant Lukashenko these powers.
Then in 2004, Lukashenko abolished presidential time period limits by way of one other such referendum, which means he might stand for election repeatedly.
Uladzimir Zhyhar, a former detective and consultant of Belpol, a gaggle of exiled ex-Belarusian cops who defected to the opposition after the protests of 2020, accused legislation enforcement of being, in the beginning, 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 providers, obey [Lukashenko]. There’s torture, there are unlawful arrests, there are interrogations … and the principle division for combating organised crime, which if it issues politically motivated crimes, they’re allowed to do all the pieces. Completely all the pieces, no matter human rights or anything.”
Between 1999 and 2000, 4 of Lukashenko’s political opponents went lacking (PDF): former Inside Minister Yury Zakharanka; lawmaker Viktar Hanchar and his pal, businessman Anatol Krasowski; and journalist Dzmitry Zavadski. An exiled member of an elite unit concentrating on gangs in 2019 admitted to collaborating in three of their abductions and murders.
Lukashenko has appointed loyalists to senior positions, each throughout the safety forces and state-run industries. However it appears that evidently he doesn’t totally belief them.
“Lukashenko completely hates individuals who could be in some place of authority, and so he’s consistently 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 high posts.
“He’s afraid that this former safety operative, having sure data, having a sure authority, will be capable of type connections and pose a menace to him.”
Between Moscow and the West
Early in his presidency, Lukashenko’s overseas coverage echoed the outdated Soviet Union’s place throughout the Chilly Struggle. He railed in opposition to Western imperialism and travelled to Belgrade amid NATO bombing to help 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. Below phrases which have been by no means totally carried out, 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 outdated 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 rather a lot to maneuver Lukashenko again to the place he belongs.”
Nonetheless, 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, corresponding to milk and cheese.
Relations remained cordial however distant all through the 2010s, with Lukashenko quietly embracing a extra Belarusian identification, even giving a speech in Belarusian in 2014 as a substitute of the customary Russian.
Nonetheless, Yauheni Preiherman of the Minsk Dialogue Council on Worldwide Relations suppose tank, says Lukashenko has been profitable at dealing with his private relationship with Putin and Minsk’s with Moscow. “I generally 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 identical time, Lukashenko began reaching out to the West, as an 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 inside repression.
On the onset of the battle 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 centered 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 advanced 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 straightforward to clarify,” he mentioned. “It’s 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 following yr all the pieces 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 broadly considered by the opposition as rigged.
A whole bunch of 1000’s 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 1000’s 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 not less than one particular person was raped in custody.
“For the primary time, he misplaced,” Zhyhar mentioned.
“He misplaced informationally. He misplaced on the road, as a result of 1000’s of individuals went out and lined up in a series of solidarity. He misplaced, in actual fact, 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 grow to be totalitarian,” Karbalevich mentioned. “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 grow to be 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, not less than 10 of whom are held in solitary confinement. They embody 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 effectively 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, now we have been repressed,” Zhyhar mentioned.
“We’ve got no impartial media, now we have no impartial commerce unions, now we have no impartial NGOs, now we have no impartial courts, now we have no impartial legislation enforcement companies. And most significantly, Lukashenko continues to be afraid of the folks. Subsequently, he doesn’t scale 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 the US, United Kingdom and EU imposed sanctions, whereas Putin supported him.
“The sanctions, once they have been initially adopted, have been proclaimed as a method to pressure Lukashenko and his authorities to reduce home repression, free prisoners, and launch an inclusive inside dialogue together with his opponents,” mentioned Preiherman.
However on all these counts, the scenario is far worse, he says. They’ve additionally created unintended penalties. “Lukashenko has had subsequent to zero manoeuvring house in relations with Russia, [and] geopolitically, they’ve ensured that Russia is the one recreation 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 suppose that Lukashenko will not be an impartial statesman, that Putin is the actual grasp of Belarus and Lukashenko is barely his puppet. I might not be so radical; Lukashenko is kind of autonomous. However in the present day, this union with Belarus and Russia could 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. Through 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 turned … I wouldn’t say buddies, however allies,” Astapenka, the previous diplomat, mentioned.
“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 prison prosecution, and lifelong help for himself and his household, ought to he retire.
“To an extent, he turned a hostage of the system that he himself created,” Karbalevich mentioned.
“He couldn’t go away 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.”
