Belarus rigged election and the tensions

[Jaga]

Lukaszenko, the last completely autoritarian president won the election getting 80% of votes according to the polls but there was so much opposition to him and protests that nobody believes in the legitimacy of the elections.

Here is more:
www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-09/belarus-votes-in-presidential-election-as-ruler-seeks-sixth-term

Alexander Lukashenko claimed a sweeping victory in presidential elections in Belarus to win a sixth term after a contest that saw the biggest opposition protests of his 26-year rule.

Lukashenko received 79.7% of the vote, with 6.8% going to opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, state-run Belarus 1 TV reported Sunday citing an official exit poll published minutes after voting ended.

Riot police used flash grenades and water cannon in confrontations with thousands of protesters who gathered in the center of the capital, Minsk, after the poll was announced, the RIA Novosti news service reported. Clashes erupted between police demonstrators in Minsk, and there were demonstrations also in the city of Brest, the Tut.by news site reported on Twitter.

Lukashenko, 65, a former Soviet collective farm boss, faced unprecedented protests against his rule before the vote, after opposition groups united behind Tikhanovskaya, a 37-year-old former teacher, when other contenders were either jailed or kept off the ballot. The stay-at-home mother, who ran after her husband Sergei, a political blogger, was detained and barred from the race, drew huge crowds at rallies nationwide.

For the opposition, “the main thing is to accept defeat,” Central Election Commission Chairwoman Lidia Yermoshina said of the preliminary results on state TV. Turnout was 84%, the Tass news service reported, citing the commission, which is due to publish official results on Monday.

Tikhanovskaya told reporters at a news conference after the exit poll that she did not recognize the results and that the majority was with the opposition, Radio Free Europe reported on its website.

The result compares to 83% won by Lukashenko in 2015 elections. Opposition activists have complained that high levels of early voting recorded ahead of polling day was an indicator of ballot fraud. The European Platform for Democratic Elections reported that observers had been restricted and detained during early voting.

[pieter]

Jaga,

The results are obviously fraudulent. President Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko rules today with his Belarussian KGB secret police force who oppresses every opposition. I wonder if Belarus will have it’s own ‘Orange Revolution’ ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Revolution ) or it’s own Euromaidan ( en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan ).

The Belarussian opposition won’t accept this fake victory of Lukashenko. I read that even Lukashenko supporters in Belarus do not believe that Lukashenko has won.

Cheers,
Pieter

[karl]

Jaga

Also this situation has given cause for ripples on this side of the European mountain as shown by D/W:

www.dw.com/en/belarus-election-germany-threatens-sanctions-over-lukashenkos-controversial-win/a-54509688


Karl

[Jaga]

here is the article why Svetlana Tikhanovskaya had to run for the office, since her husband was detained. She became a very popular and was supported by wives of other opposition members that are inprisoned. Lukashenko is not afraid of women, since he doed not believe women can win election in Belarus.


How a homemaker with no political experience took on Europe’s longest-serving dictator



Svetlana Tikhanovskaya became a symbol for the democratic future Belarus could have, not the autocratic one it has now.
By Alex [e-mail]@vox.com Aug 10, 2020, 6:40pm EDT
Presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya casts her vote into a ballot box during the 2020 Belarusian presidential election. Valery Sharifulin/TASS/Getty Images

One of Europe’s last remaining dictators held onto power after facing his greatest political challenge in decades — and rigged an election to do so.

Alexander Lukashenko has served as Belarus’s president since 1994, when he won the presidency in the country’s last national democratic election since gaining independence from the Soviet Union. That’s because Lukashenko has remained in power ever since thanks to a combination of brutal repression and rigged elections. He’s now Europe’s longest-serving leader.

But after 26 years, many Belarusians have had enough of Lukashenko. Hundreds of thousands of people have rallied for weeks against him in the largest protests of the country’s post-Soviet history.

A government-backed poll from April found only a third of Belarusians trusted him — one of the lowest ratings of his rule. While good polling is hard to come by in Belarus, that one made sense: The dictator both minimized and mishandled his nation’s coronavirus outbreak, oversaw a collapsing economy, and struggled to keep an encroaching Russia at bay.

With such dismal approval ratings, most experts believe Lukashenko would’ve lost a free and fair vote. Which is why Lukashenko did everything in his power to make sure Sunday’s election was anything but free and fair.

And sure enough, Lukashenko won Sunday’s election in a landslide, receiving over 80 percent of the vote. “I don’t know who voted for him, how could he get 80 percent?” a Belarusian named Dmitri, who wouldn’t divulge his last name for security reasons, told the New York Times on Sunday.

His “victory” came down to a tried-and-true autocratic method: brutality. “That [was] the strategy for Lukashenko for this election,” said Ryhor Astapenia, a Belarus expert at the Chatham House think tank in Britain. “No sweeteners, only repression.”

The 65-year-old former collective farm director jailed two of the three top opposition candidates and barred the third from running; he also detained journalists and even alleged Russian mercenaries the regime claimed were trying to disrupt the election prior to the vote.

But his tactics didn’t quell people’s aspirations for democracy. It lit them on fire — thanks in part to the efforts of one determined stay-at-home mom.
The homemaker versus the dictator

One of Lukashenko’s main opponents in this year’s election was Sergei Tikhanovsky, a famous YouTuber who made his name highlighting Belarus’s many problems. Two days after he announced his candidacy for president, he was arrested by the regime on charges of violating public order and election laws.

That might’ve been the end of the story. But it wasn’t: That’s because his wife, a 37-year-old former English translator turned homemaker named Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, stepped in to run for president instead.

She proved wildly successful, coalescing a nationwide movement to defeat the longtime leader and then hold actually fair elections. That she did so despite having no political experience, acknowledging she didn’t want to be president, and reminding crowds she’d prefer to be making cutlets for her children made her rise all the more surprising.

That energy persisted even after the election results were announced Sunday. The regime-run election commission said the challenger only received about 10 percent of the vote, far less than the 80 percent she garnered in some unbiased exit polls. Thousands poured into the streets of Minsk, Belarus’s capital, on Sunday to protest the election’s results.

Demonstrators have been met with tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets shot by regime forces, even though observers on the scene have yet to report one instance of violence by anti-Lukashenko protesters. Reports indicate at least one protester has died.

Viasna, a Belarusian human rights group, says they know of about 140 people among thousands detained by authorities while many more sustained injuries. The Trump administration on Monday proclaimed support for the democratic movement.

Tikhanovskaya has made clear she rejects the regime-announced results. “I will believe my own eyes — the majority was for us,” she said during a Monday press conference in Minsk. “The authorities should think about how to peacefully hand over power to us,” she continued. “I consider myself the winner of this election.”
www.vox.com/2020/8/10/21357805/belarus-election-tikhanovskaya-lukashenko-protest-minsk

[pieter]

www.google.nl/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-europe-53733330

edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2020/08/11/linas-linkevicius-amanpour-lithuania-belarus-svetlana-tikhanovskaya.cnn/video/playlists/amanpour/

www.google.nl/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/world/europe/belarus-election-Svetlana-Tikhanovskaya.amp.html

[pieter]

www.polskieradio.pl/395/7785/Artykul/2564101,Ambassador-demands-release-of-three-Poles-detained-in-Belarus

www.polskieradio.pl/395/7785/Artykul/2564003,Polish-president-urges-UN-Human-Rights-Council-to-react-to-violence-in-Belarus

[Jaga]

Pieter, Poland and Lithuania formed the common front and wrote the protest against this situation. Belarussian do not stop protesting. They are fed up with the system

People over 20 years old never knew another president than Lukaschenko


0:00 / 1:22
Protests held in Belarus amid claims president rigged election

[pieter]

Jaga,

Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko (born 30 August 1954) is an old school, Sovjet style, Post-Communist (former communist) East-European dictator. A Machiavellist, opportunist and authoritarian polician and leader. The Pro-Russian Alexander Lukashenko espoused communist principles and became president of the country in 1994.

In contrast to much of central and eastern Europe at the time, Lukashenko set Belarus on a course of isolation from the West during the nineties, maintaining the economics of market socialism. Support for the government’s efforts to establish close ties with Russia was widespread but not without opposition. In 1997–99 Belarus entered the Union State, a political and economic union with Russia that had initially been negotiated with Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin but was recast by his successor, Vladimir Putin, who lessened the burden his country had initially agreed to bear in the partnership.

Lukashenko improved relations with the EU in 2008 when he agreed to the release of several political prisoners, including Kazulin, and appeared to adopt a more tolerant attitude toward the nongovernmental media. He also supported economic reforms, including the privatization of some state companies and the encouragement of foreign investment. The EU subsequently suspended a restriction that since 2006 had banned the president and most of his entourage from entering the EU. In 2009 Belarus joined the EU’s Eastern Partnership Program, which promotes ties between the EU and a number of countries in eastern Europe and the Caucasus region. However, by early 2010 the Belarusian government’s continuation of various repressive policies had renewed concerns in some EU capitals.

Lukashenko easily won another term as president in elections held in late 2010, but again there were protests by opposition supporters in Minsk on the fairness of the voting, as well as objections by EU and U.S. observers. As in 2006, large numbers of demonstrators were arrested or detained by authorities, as were most of the opposition candidates for president.

In April 2011 a bomb exploded on a crowded metro platform in Minsk, killing 12 and injuring more than 100. The blast heightened tensions in the country, which was struggling with a soaring budget deficit and an ongoing foreign exchange crisis. Sharply declining foreign currency reserves led to a devaluation of the Belarusian rubel, which shed more than 60 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar during 2011. The plummeting rubel triggered a wave of inflation, which peaked at almost 110 percent in January 2012. The Belarusian central bank responded by raising interest rates to 45 percent, the highest in the world at the time. A $3 billion bailout program, begun in 2011 and primarily financed by Russia, helped to stabilize the economy.

The economic crisis did little to weaken Lukashenko’s regime, and opposition parties boycotted parliamentary elections held in September 2012. The elections, which Western observers characterized as unfair and lacking transparency, saw politicians allied with Lukashenko returned to every one of the parliament’s 110 seats.

In 2014 Lukashenko inserted himself into the conflict in eastern Ukraine when he offered to broker a deal that would, it was hoped, end the Russian-backed insurgency there. A pair of meetings were held in Minsk with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian Pres. Petro Poroshenko, and the result was a 13-point protocol that laid the foundation for a cease-fire. Although the actual implementation of that agreement was slow to come and fighting continued in the Donets Basin, some observers believed that Lukashenko’s emergence as a would-be regional peacemaker might signal an intention to abandon the autocratic tendencies that had characterized his rule. Indeed, ahead of the 2015 presidential election, Lukashenko freed a number of political prisoners and welcomed international observers. In that contest Lukashenko once again claimed an overwhelming victory against token opposition, but “significant problems” with the electoral process were noted by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Lukashenko appeared to be on track for another heavily managed victory in the 2020 presidential election, but his poor handling of the COVID-19 epidemic and the overt nature of his electoral interference—which included the jailing of opposition candidates—sparked the largest wave of popular demonstrations in Belarus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nearly 7,000 people were arrested, and scores were injured in clashes with police, while workers in state-owned factories walked off the job in protest. Lukashenko rejected calls for a new election, characterizing the demonstrators as foreign-controlled “rats.”

Cheers,
Pieter

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica

[pieter]

State Security Committee of the Republic of Belarus: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Security_Committee_of_the_Republic_of_Belarus

[Jaga]

Pieter,

thank you for this introduction to Lukashenko. Yes, he is an old school, and Belarussians are usually very easily going people not rebellious, but this is too much even for them.

Unfortunatelly Putin seem to be supporting Lukashenko, since Putin supports Lukashenko, and Trump supports Putin we have a chain of inaction. I hope that the democracy would win this time again.

[Jaga]

BBC has an article analyzing in detail while Poland is supporting Belarus:

www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54090389

Belarus protests: Why Poland is backing the opposition

By Adam Easton
BBC News, Warsaw

Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki pictured with the leader of the Belarusian opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskayaimage copyrightGetty Images
image captionPolish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki met Belarus's exiled opposition leader on Wednesday

Poland is one of the leading countries pushing the EU to take action against the authoritarian government in Belarus, after a disputed presidential election triggered massive street protests and a crackdown on the opposition.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has described recent events in the neighbouring country as a "breakthrough".
"Belarusians have not only broken through their own fear, but they have shown the whole of Europe that they want to belong to a Europe of free, democratic, nations under the rule of law," he told Polish Radio on Wednesday.
He spoke ahead of a meeting in Warsaw with the leader of the Belarusian opposition, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who has been forced into exile in Lithuania.

How Poland is backing the opposition
Warsaw is supporting Belarusian opposition demands for a new and fair election and has called for the release of all political prisoners.

Veronika Tsepkalo, one of three women who joined forces in the election against long-time leader Alexander Lukashenko, has subsequently found exile in Poland. So too has opposition activist Olga Kovalkova.
And Polish hospitals are treating Belarusian activists who have been injured or tortured by the authorities in Minsk.

The Polish government has also announced a 50m zloty (£10.2m; €11.2m) aid package to help the Belarusian people come to Poland to work or study.
Poland has offered the Belarusian leader the use of a houseimage copyrightDominika Pasterska
image captionPoland has offered the Belarusian leader the use of a house in Warsaw
For years, the Polish state has been financially supporting independent Belarusian-staffed media based in Poland broadcasting to Belarusians, such as Radio Racja and Belsat TV.
The small Belarusian editorial team of Nexta TV that broadcasts user-generated content from its two million subscribers on YouTube and Telegram is also based in Warsaw.

Centuries of shared history

The reason that Poland is so interested in what's going on in Belarus is not only geographic. Poland's 400km (248-mile) long frontier with Belarus forms part of the EU's eastern external border. It is less than 200km from Warsaw.
In fact, the two nations share centuries of history that have left a substantial Polish minority in Belarus and a smaller Belarusian community in Poland. That group in Poland is expanding, thanks to increasing numbers of Belarusians seeking work.

Several 19th Century writers, including Jan Czeczot and Wincenty Dunin-Marcinkiewicz, wrote both in Polish and Belarusian.
"We were citizens of the same federal state, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, for more than four hundred years, one of whose languages was Belarusian," MEP Radoslaw Sikorski told me.
media captionLithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda: Democratic values do not have a price
As Poland's foreign minister, he co-authored the EU's Eastern Partnership programme designed to improve the bloc's relations with six eastern European nations, including Belarus.
"It's only natural for Poland to take an interest in Belarus and there is agreement on this across the political spectrum," he said.
But is its reputation tarnished?

After Poland's Solidarity movement toppled the communist regime in 1989, Warsaw used its credibility as a country that had undergone a successful transition to support democratic change in Ukraine and Belarus.
And, after Poland joined the EU in 2004, it also sought to influence the bloc's policy towards the region.
media captionWhat lies behind the Belarus protests?
But, according to Prof Agnieszka Bienczyk-Missala from Warsaw University, Poland's credibility with the Belarusian opposition was tarnished in 2016.
This was when Mr Morawiecki, who was then deputy prime minister, met Belarus's authoritarian leader in Minsk to try to improve economic relations between the two neighbours.
"Poland made a mistake adopting a policy of dialogue with Lukashenko that was partly a reaction to the annexation of Crimea by Russia," Prof Bienczyk-Missala said. "I think this resulted in Poland being unable to establish close links with the Belarusian opposition and Lithuania was able to do so".
She adds that Poland's credibility has been tarnished further due to its own problems with the rule of law.
The Belarusian minority living in Poland wait for the exiled Belarus opposition leaderimage copyrightGetty Images
image captionPeople show their support for Belarus's exiled opposition leader in Warsaw
The European Commission and many other international organisations have criticised the governing Law and Justice (PiS) coalition's changes to Poland's judicial system over the past five years, saying they undermine its independence.
The Polish presidential run-off in July that saw PiS ally Andrzej Duda re-elected was well run, the OSCE's Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights said, but biased coverage by the public broadcaster in support of Mr Duda tarnished the election.
"Do we have the moral authority in criticising another country's election?" Mr Sikorski said.
"We used to be a democratic mecca and now we're being pilloried for breaches of the rule of law," he added. "We've squandered some of the political capital we used to have."

[pieter]

[Jaga]

Pieter, this was a good interview. I think that Belarus will get rid of Lukashenko in the near future. It may take some time, but the new generation is coming.

[Jaga]

The tensions in Belarus are still very high. Every weekend thousands of people meet for these marches:

apnews.com/article/alexander-lukashenko-belarus-sviatlana-tsikhanouskaya-elections-minsk-0349a60292fe90f37ac91b72dbe73973

Over 50,000 march in Belarus against authoritarian leader

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Belarus’ capital on Sunday, demanding the ouster of the country’s authoritarian leader who won his sixth term in office in an election widely seen as rigged.

More than 50,000 people took part in the rally in Minsk, according to the Viasna human rights center. Demonstrators carried banners mocking President Alexander Lukashenko, who has run the country for 26 years, and chanted “Go away!”

Mass protests have rocked Belarus since the Aug. 9 presidential election that handed Lukashenko a victory with 80% of the vote. His main challenger, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, got 10%. She and her supporters refused to recognize the results, saying the outcome of the vote was manipulated.