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 a long time, will virtually definitely retain his seat.
Whereas Vladimir Putin’s Russia tolerated a level of open dissent, no less than 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 anyplace else on this planet,” he instructed Reuters in 2012.
Belarus’s opposition, the USA, 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 worry of shedding management.
“This want for energy has been driving him for 30 years. It doesn’t let him chill out 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 reminiscent of vodka and visits to the sauna with the ability to forestall 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 towards 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 immediately: ‘For those who 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 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. In contrast to them, nonetheless, Lukashenko didn’t embrace nationalism and was the only lawmaker in Soviet Belarus to vote towards 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,” mentioned Karbalevich.
Lukashenko, then 39, received Belarus’s first, and to this point solely, presidential election deemed free and truthful by exterior observers in 1994. The impartial candidate ran on a populist platform, pledging to root out corruption and railing towards 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 tough to pinpoint when precisely Lukashenko developed distrustful tendencies, or whether or not he all the time had them, he survived an assassination try on the marketing campaign path when his automobile got here beneath fireplace by unknown assailants. A state tv documentary later claimed the attackers had been engaged on behalf of high-ranking officers.
Lukashenko received roughly 80 % 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 12 months of assuming workplace, Lukashenko held a referendum that modified Belarus’s white-and-red flag to at least one intently resembling the outdated Soviet design. He instructed World Warfare 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 trade 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, not like in Russia and Ukraine, though a handful of businessmen with hyperlinks to the federal government have prospered lately.
“At the start of his presidency, he was actually widespread,” defined Karbalevich.
“He thought of 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 method to voting cubicles.
‘Afraid to look him within the eye’
Karbalevich believes that again then, Lukashenko had a imaginative and prescient and needed 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 needed the state to regulate the economic system.
To an extent, it proved environment friendly: not like Russia, which was affected by poverty and organised crime within the Nineteen Nineties, Belarus was comparatively secure and the inequality hole was slim. The nation’s Gini coefficient – a wealth inequality measure – has maintained a greater steadiness 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 often photographed participating in “subbotnik” – the Soviet observe of endeavor 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 robust, wholesome chief by taking part in hockey.
“Lukashenko enjoys night occasions,” mentioned 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 may 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 quite a bit, after which he may even go dancing. This is part of his life hidden from society.”
However one other facet of Lukashenko’s management rapidly turned obvious early in his rule.
“Concern. 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. It is a paternalistic system of energy. As quickly as he leaves, everybody’s heads will rise, everybody will begin speaking and performing otherwise. In public, Lukashenko is outwardly a really merciless particular person, able to publicly humiliating anybody. He doesn’t take note of different folks’s factors of view.”
Consolidating energy
Inside two years of entering 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 means of one other such referendum, that means he may 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 regulation enforcement of being, at 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 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 every thing. Completely every thing, 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 buddy, businessman Anatol Krasowski; and journalist Dzmitry Zavadski. An exiled member of an elite unit focusing 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 may be in some place of authority, and so he’s always engaged within the rotation of personnel,” Zhyhar defined. And whereas former safety personnel might 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 have the ability to 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 in the course of the Chilly Warfare. He railed towards 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. Beneath phrases which had been by no means absolutely carried out, Russia and Belarus would have re-united.
“Lukashenko had a want to unite with Russia into one state and to beat 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 may 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 had been “very, very tense”, added Vladzimir Astapenka, who served as a Belarusian diplomat to a number of Latin American nations within the 2010s. “They had been like opponents, and Putin did quite a bit 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, reminiscent of 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 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 this 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, 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 top of the story,” Preiherman defined.
However what will get missed 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 straightforward to clarify,” he mentioned. “It is because the construction of Belarus is way 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 needed to push forward with reintegration, however Lukashenko warned any such motion by Moscow can be interpreted as hostile, and the Kremlin fired again by chopping its oil subsidies.
The following 12 months every thing modified.
‘Enacting vengeance’ towards protesters
Within the presidential elections of 2020, Lukashenko claimed victory with greater than 80 % of the vote, a poll that was broadly considered by the opposition as rigged.
Tons of of hundreds of individuals poured into the streets within the largest mass protests ever seen in Belarus. They had been met by truncheon-wielding riot squads. About 35,000 had been arrested, and hundreds had been allegedly beaten or tortured in custody. As much as as many as 15 protesters had been killed throughout or within the aftermath of the unrest, and no 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 hundreds of individuals went out and lined up in a sequence of solidarity. He misplaced, in reality, even on the elections themselves, as a result of everybody noticed the queues that had 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 towards him.”
There are at present greater than 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus, no 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 properly conscious that not all of the folks towards him have left the nation, and he didn’t imprison everybody. And subsequently, for 4 and a half years, we now have been repressed,” Zhyhar mentioned.
“We’ve got no impartial media, we now have no impartial commerce unions, we now have no impartial NGOs, we now have no impartial courts, we now have no impartial regulation enforcement companies. And most significantly, Lukashenko remains to be afraid of the folks. Due to this fact, 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 the USA, United Kingdom and EU imposed sanctions, whereas Putin supported him.
“The sanctions, once they had been initially adopted, had been proclaimed as a method to power Lukashenko and his authorities to reduce home repression, free prisoners, and launch an inclusive inside dialogue along with his opponents,” mentioned Preiherman.
However on all these counts, the state of affairs is way 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 introduced 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 is just not an impartial statesman, that Putin is the true grasp of Belarus and Lukashenko is simply his puppet. I’d not be so radical; Lukashenko is kind of autonomous. However right now, 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. 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 opponents they turned … I wouldn’t say mates, however allies,” Astapenka, the previous diplomat, mentioned.
“And Putin wants Lukashenko to regulate Belarus.”
Final January, Lukashenko signed a regulation stopping opposition leaders overseas from standing in presidential elections and granting himself lifetime immunity from legal prosecution, and lifelong assist 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 needed to. He’s afraid for his life, for his freedom, and subsequently he’ll maintain on to his energy to the top.”
