Aleksandr Lukashenko won his seventh term as president with 86.82% of the vote and a turnout of 85.9%, results typical for dictatorial regimes. The figures were touted as proof of stability in Belarus, popular support for Lukashenko and tolerance of the opposition. However, the elections were neither free nor fair, but just a show that fooled no one.
Free elections, Lukashenko's version: no independent observers, regime-selected opponents, imprisoned opponents, only government-affiliated media
BELPOL (a pro-opposition association of former law enforcement officers), asserts that 97% of election commission leaders have previously been involved in election fraud. Photographing or filming ballots has been banned – this measure was introduced after countless ballot photos served as evidence of fraud during the 2020 elections. Additionally, BELPOL highlights that there were no independent observers, and candidates from the democratic opposition were not allowed to run in the elections. Moreover, there were no overseas polling stations, with Belarusians abroad being asked to return home to cast their votes, which is impossible for hundreds of thousands of people who had to flee the country because of political persecution.
The level of repression increased significantly in the two months leading to the elections. The political police, KGB, and other regime enforcement agencies put together special lists of people who were to be placed into “preventive arrest” before January 26. There were also the lists of workers of various state institutions who had to be either fired or arrested and subsequently fired. Usually it happened as a raid: the armed masked riot police broke into the place and arrested the people they had on the list. The reason usually was any political activity in 2020 or after – from supporting the participation of a democratic candidate in the elections to joining any kind of protests. On January 23, 2025, for instance, the media reported that enforcement agencies raided the houses of current and former political prisoners, arresting 84 people.
Against this background Lukashenko freed several political prisoners while the propaganda TV channels showed some of the most well-known ones, who are still imprisoned: for example Maria Kalesnikava and Viktar Babaryka, who were held in incommunicado regime for almost two years. It should have been considered as the attempt of the regime to repeat the trick of previous years: release the political prisoners and exchange that for political recognition and legitimisation.
Regime propaganda: Belarus, an oasis of stability besieged by the West; Lukashenko, the only guarantor of peace
The rhetoric of Lukashenko and his top nomenclature didn’t sound peaceful. As usual, they repeated an old fairy-tale about the West preparing an armed invasion in Belarus to overthrow the Lukashenko regime. Deputy defence minister Yury Ravenka on January 11, 2025 stated that the representatives of Belarusian diaspora are trained to conduct an armed attack on Belarus: “These are not so much the actions of the military departments of our border states, but rather the actions of certain political circles, governments that form units from our “fugitives”, train and arm them. There is a threat here, definitely. Perhaps there will be inappropriate behavior or they will simply be given an order to do something, some kind of provocation. We are ready for this”.
On January the 21st, just five days before the elections, the regime propaganda released a special video feature called “Belarus – the synonym of security”. The aim was to bolster Lukashenko’s credentials as the only guarantee for peace in Belarus. The president’s special assistant Viktar Sheiman (his right hand and the only person to stay in the high nomenclature since 1994, when Lukashenko came to power) claims, on the record, that Lukashenko already saved the country from war twice: “We are the only ones left in the post-Soviet space on a patch of land where the situation is calm, the sky is peaceful. And believe me, even in the last period, literally in the last five years, the President has saved our country from war twice. If the situation had gone differently in 2020... Let's make a forecast together. The opposition comes to power, help is requested from Western countries, and Western countries introduce troops into the territory of the Republic of Belarus. If NATO troops were on the border of Viciebsk region and Smolensk region, it’s 400 kilometers to Moscow. As a military man, I understand perfectly well what this is... This would have already happened in 2020. The President saved us. He kept the situation in the Republic of Belarus, worked on it, and people began to live and work peacefully. 2022. We were also on the brink of war. We could have broken down at any moment. If not for the position of our Head of State, Alexander Grigorievich, we would have slipped into war. That is, in 5 years, he has twice led the country away from war.”
However, the “safest place in the world” mantra is just propaganda. The Global Peace Ranking by the Institute for Economics & Peace, lists Belarus on the 116th place out of 165 countries – worse than Benin, Congo or Rwanda.
Theatre of the absurd: the people begged Lukashenko to run for office, the presidential dog urinated in the polling station
Lukashenko’s re-election seemed like some sort of an absurd play. It all started before the electoral campaign, when the strongman in Minsk claimed, in an interview granted to Russian propagandist Olga Skabeeva, that he will “run for president” only in case “the Belarusian people tell him it’s necessary”. On October 23, 2024, the regime started a weeks-long campaign featuring recordings of workers of state enterprises, officials, students, sportsmen and other people dependent on the state budget saying “It’s necessary, Alexander Grigorievich!” or simply “Necessary!”.
The regions of the country were trying to outperform each other in terms of early voting participation. Throughout the history of the Lukashenko regime this mechanism has been one of the main instruments of vote fraud, as it’s almost impossible to be controlled even in the presence of international independent observers, let alone when they are kept out, as it happened in the latest elections. So this year, another record was set: almost 42% of the total number of registered voters voted early.
The number of voters also raises significant questions. According to the Lukashenko regime, the total number of votes was 5,9 million, while there were more than 6,9 million registered voters for this election. However, according to a BELPOL investigation, the total population of Belarus was estimated by the regime in secret documents as a bit more than 7,5 million of people. So it is just impossible to have such a number of voters, but the regime won’t acknowledge the dramatic changes in Belarus’ demography after the 2020 protests and subsequent reaction.
To crown it all, on January 26 Lukashenko decided to take his dog Umka when he went to vote, even though the law doesn’t allow pets in the polling station. Umka swiftly claimed the territory of the polling station by urinating there.
The very next day after the elections, the propaganda launched another campaign of testimonials. This time, the workers of state institutions were made to record videos with congratulations for Lukashenko. All these videos were published in various propaganda sources on social networks.
The elections show was a fiasco for the Lukashenko regime
On the election day, January 26, Lukashenko held a 4-hour long press conference. Besides repeating the abovementioned fairy-tales about the West being eager to destabilise the situation in Belarus by military and hybrid means, he tried to pretend he’s not interested in the opinion of the EU: “Whether you recognize these elections there in the European Union or not is a matter of taste. Believe me, I swear, I don't give a damn whether you recognize our elections or not”. It was, obviously, a lie; the show of a democratic exercise and the release of political prisoners should have convinced even the West that the regime can be a dialogue partner. Lukashenko wanted to demonstrate to the audience both inside and outside the country that he is the man in control of Belarus, who has the support of population, so if anybody wants to talk about the future – not only that of the country, but of the whole region – has to go to him.
However, also on the “election day”, Belarusian democratic forces and representatives of Belarusian diaspora held manifestations all over the world to show their disagreement with what happens inside Belarus. The largest took place in Warsaw and Vilnius, who host large communities of Belarusian exiles. In Kyiv, a march in the memory of Mykhailo Zhyznevsky and all Belarusians who died fighting for Ukraine, was held. Mykhailo Zhyznevsky was killed on January 22, 2014, during the Revolution of Dignity and was awarded a Hero of Ukraine.
It is clear that Belarusian democratic forces wanted both to draw attention to the situation in Belarus, and to prevent the regime propaganda from flooding the news with its narratives. Proposing alternative events and activities was quite successful and covered in the media.
In fact, the dictator's attempt to regain some sort of political legitimacy had failed even before the official election date. Nine days before that, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued a statement reading that “the 2025 presidential election in Belarus cannot be free or fair in the country’s current repressive environment… The United States joins many of our European allies in assessing that elections cannot be credible in an environment where censorship is ubiquitous and independent media outlets no longer exist, where only regime-approved candidates can even appear on the ballot, and where members of the opposition are either imprisoned or in exile”. On January 22, the European Parliament adopted a resolution calling on the EU to reject the upcoming presidential election in Belarus on 26 January as a sham. The same day, the Senate of Poland adopted the special resolution stating the presidential election in Belarus is unfair and not transparent. Senate Speaker Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska stated that “these are pseudo-elections, conducted without independent media and external observers”.
Western criticism of the elections was renewed on January 27. The EU, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK made a common statement, in which they underlined the necessity of hardline position on the Lukashenko regime: “We are united in our condemnation of the sham presidential elections in Belarus on 26 January and the ongoing human rights violations perpetrated by the Belarusian regime. Recently announced sanctions represent a coordinated, multilateral effort to hold the Lukashenko regime to account”.
Finally, on January 29, the UN Group of Independent Experts on Belarus expressed “deep concern about the re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko and the possible impact this may have on the already dire human rights situation in Belarus”. The experts estimated that the regime “failed to hold genuine democratic elections”.
This wasn’t the outcome Lukashenko wanted to see. The Minsk dictator’s show to persuade the world he’s in legal power in Belarus failed.
