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Europe’s longest-serving leader won re-election in a contest widely believe to have been rigged. The result cements the power of a leader whose country is considered Russia’s staunchest ally.
Jan. 26, 2025, 2:43 p.m. ET
Europe’s longest-serving leader, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, cruised to his seventh election victory in a row on Sunday in a contest that his exiled opponents dismissed as a sham, whose only purpose was to cement his autocratic grip on the former Soviet republic, Russia’s closest ally.
“Don’t use the word election to describe this farce,” said Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, an opposition leader who fled Belarus after the country’s previous presidential vote in 2020 and a brutal crackdown on nationwide protests over election fraud. “It is a staged performance by Lukashenko to cling to power at any cost.”
A survey of voters leaving polling places that was released by state media Sunday evening showed Mr. Lukashenko getting 87.6 percent of the vote, more than the 81 percent he claimed to have won in 2020. Exit polls are controlled by the state like all aspects of elections in Belarus and generally reflect the ultimate outcome.
Unlike in 2020, when Ms. Tikhanovskaya was allowed to run against Mr. Lukashenko and declared herself the winner, Sunday’s election was a tightly controlled and tame affair, featuring only candidates loyal to the president. None expressed any desire to actually defeat Mr. Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist since 1994.
Four rival candidates, according to the exit poll, garnered less than two percent of the vote each, except for the leader of the Communist Party, Sergei Syrankov, who captured 2.7 percent.
With all of Mr. Lukashenko’s prominent opponents either in jail or in exile and Belarus’ media outlets all cheering for the incumbent, the result was a foregone conclusion. But it is one that still mattered to the president, who is eager to show his country — and also President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — that the turmoil of 2020 has been tamed.
