TRUE TO form, President Alexander Lukashenko has swept the board. Of the 109 winning candidates for parliament in Belarus’s “election” every single one is from parties that back the authoritarian president who has run the former Soviet state, Europe’s last dictatorship, since 1994, and who was “re-elected” in 2010 for his fourth term. Not a single election in the last two decades in the country of 9.5 million has been adjudged fair by international monitors, and scores of oppositionists are in jail or exile.
The regime claimed a turnout of 74 per cent, suggesting the call by sections of the opposition for a boycott was unsuccessful. The two main opposition parties, the United Civic Party and the Belarussian People’s Front, had called on people to go mushrooming or fishing instead. But the turnout figure is not likely to be any more reliable than the final vote tally. Most opposition candidates had, in any case, been debarred from taking part in the election, while those allowed to compete faced what the EU described as “an overall climate of repression and intimidation”.
“This election was not competitive,” said Matteo Mecacci, an Italian MP and the head of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observer mission: “A free election depends on people being free to speak, organise and run for office, and we didn’t see that.” Many prominent politicians who might have taken part “remained in prison or were not eligible to register because of their criminal record,” he noted.
The election’s conduct makes it extremely unlikely the EU will relax sanctions, or a visa ban and foreign assets freeze on Lukashenko and 200-plus senior officials when foreign ministers review it next month. When the EU added to its blacklist in February, Lukashenko expelled the EU and Polish ambassadors, prompting all other EU states to withdraw theirs in protest.
The deepening of the rift with the rest of Europe will see Belarus increasing again its embrace of a cynically uncritical Russia which yesterday described the election as “conducted freely, openly, in a calm atmosphere.” Moscow, which has in the past obstructed OSCE monitoring of its own elections, accused the organisation’s monitors of having taken a “politicised approach”. Moscow has also helped manage the country’s balance of payments crisis with a $3 billion bailout, although at a price. Minsk ceded ownership of its gas-pipeline network to Russia’s largest company, the largely state-controlled Gazprom for $2.5 billion.