Clashes erupted between protesters and riot police in Minsk and other cities in Belarus on Sunday, after a state TV exit poll said that longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko had secured a landslide victory against his main challenger Svetlana Tikhanovskaya with 79.7% of the vote.
Lukashenko, who has been in office since 1994, had promised the opposition that he would not give up his “beloved” Belarus, as security was dramatically tightened in the capital in recent weeks. Despite his vows to crush any dissent, thousands of people took to the streets across the country, chanting “LEAVE!” as the police used water cannons, rubber bullets, flash grenades, and teargas to quash protests. There were reports of injuries and dozens of arrests, though the interior ministry denied that anyone was wounded.
The last few weeks have seen drastic and heinous crackdowns on Lukashenko’s political opponents and fellow presidential candidates, with the President even issuing an open threat last month to expel foreign journalists from the nation, urging them to focus on “harvests, not protests”. In the days leading up to the election, Belarusian authorities detained hundreds of protesters and media officials, which prompted his principal challenger Ms. Tikhanovskaya to go into hiding on the eve of the vote. In the past, In the past, Lukashenko has crushed protests with riot police and hefty jail terms, actions that prompted international sanctions. Just before casting his vote on Sunday, Lukashenko once again warned of severe consequences of any disruptions to the process, saying that anyone seeking to “go against” Belarus and upset stability would “receive an immediate response” from him.
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The 65-year-old faces his biggest political challenge to his authoritarian rule in over two decades, with his citizenry growing angrier day by day at his inefficiency in handling the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing economic crisis, and the gross human rights violations carried out by his administration on the daily. His opponents had previously said that they expected the election results to be rigged. Honest People, an independent election monitoring association in Belarus said that it found 5096 violations from observers, and questioned the central election commissions turnout statistics, given that almost 70 election observers were detained. In July, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), which assesses the fairness of elections, also announced that it would be pulling out of a planned visit to the country, leaving no credible monitors to oversee the vote.
Official results are expected to be announced on Monday for the first round of the election. A contender must receive more than 50% of the vote to win.