Longtime president and Putin ally has silenced media and criminalised dissent as he eyes seventh term
n Sunday, five names will feature on the ballot in Belarus’s presidential election, but the outcome is a foregone conclusion: Alexander Lukashenko’s 31-year reign is poised to continue in the carefully managed vote, granting the dictator his seventh term in power.
“What in the democratic world you call elections has nothing in common with this event in Belarus,” said the exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, speaking this week in Davos. “Because it’s mostly like a ritual for dictators when they are reappointing themselves.” Artyom Shraibman, a Belarusian political analyst and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace thinktank, said: “The pardons appear to be an attempt by Lukashenko to open a dialogue with the west, not necessarily in expectation of an immediate lifting of sanctions, but at least to gauge whether it might be possible to ease or remove them in the future.”
Tsikhanouskaya – whose husband, Siarhei, remains behind bars in Belarus – said the releases, while welcome, did not represent any easing of repression because more people were being arrested all the time.
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