Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko
The only leader most people in Belarus have ever known, Alexander Lukashenko, who had ruled Belarus for the past three decades, "won" a seventh consecutive mandate in an election denounced by both the opposition and the European Union as a sham vote. According to exit polls, the Russia-aligned leader was re-elected with 87.6 percent of the vote.
Exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who ran against Lukashenko in 2020, dismissed the vote as a "farce". "What is happening in Belarus today is a farce," she told reporters in Warsaw, branding Lukashenko "a criminal who has seized power" and calling for the release of all political prisoners and free and far elections.
A.G. Lukashenko is the Commander-in-Chief of the Republic of Belarus Armed Forces; he heads the Security Council of the Republic of Belarus. He is Chairman of the Supreme State Council of the Union of Belarus and Russia. Lukashenko as a product of his upbringing -- a Belarusian Soviet peasant turned ideology officer. Raised in the Soviet Union, Lukashenko naturally believed that the state rules the people, but as a Belarusian he wanted to develop the country apart from Moscow.
Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko is the leading politician of the present-day Belarus. Mundane coverage of Lukashenko's daily activities normally dominates the first 30 minutes of the daily state television news. He had not belonged to the Communist Party or government nomenclature, nor had he held any posts in the top power hierarchy. When being deputy of the BSSR Supreme Soviet he was the only one to vote against the Belovezh Agreements on the abolishment of the USSR.
Immediately post-independence, Belarus suffered from a stagnating economy, corruption, inflation and racketeering gangs. Lukashenko, then 39, won Belarus’s first, and so far only, presidential election deemed free and fair by outside observers in 1994. On the 10th of July 1994, as a result of difficult election campaign involving five other contenders from the whole spectrum of the country's political forces, A.G. Lukashenko was elected the President of the Republic of Belarus. He received more than 80 percent of the electors' votes. The independent candidate ran on a populist platform, pledging to root out corruption and railing against the “lawlessness” which he said held the country “hostage”.
While it is difficult to pinpoint when exactly Lukashenko developed distrustful tendencies, or whether he always had them, he survived an assassination attempt on the campaign trail when his car came under fire by unknown assailants. A state television documentary later claimed the attackers were working on behalf of high-ranking officials.
The referenda of 1995 and 1996 determined the constitutional structure of the country, resolved the language problems, approved the state symbols, spoke up unambiguously for the union with Russia. Lukashenko held a referendum that changed Belarus’s white-and-red flag to one closely resembling the old Soviet design. He told World War II veterans, “We have returned to you the national flag of the country for which you fought.”
He maintained a planned economy, with state monopolies over industry and kept the collective farms open, winning the loyalty of the agricultural sector. This state-run economy prevented the emergence of powerful oligarchs dominating national politics, unlike in Russia and Ukraine, although a handful of businessmen with links to the government have prospered in recent years. Lukashenko had a vision and wanted to go down in history as the man who “created the Belarusian statehood” and an alternative model to post-communist transition in other countries, but he also wanted the state to control the economy.
To an extent, it proved efficient: unlike Russia, which was plagued by poverty and organised crime in the 1990s, Belarus was relatively safe and the inequality gap was narrow. The country’s Gini coefficient – a wealth inequality measure – has maintained a better balance than its neighbours and even parts of Western Europe.
Within two years of stepping into office, Lukashenko engineered a constitutional referendum giving him control over parliament and the security apparatus. The opposition alleged widespread voting fraud, although it’s also possible a part of the citizenry, wary of the instability in neighbouring Russia, was indeed willing to grant Lukashenko those powers. After the referendum of 1996, the police, courts, prosecutor’s office, investigative committee and, of course, special services, obey Lukashenko. There is torture, there are illegal arrests, there are interrogations … and the main department for fighting organised crime, which if it concerns politically motivated crimes, they are allowed to do everything. Absolutely everything, regardless of human rights or anything else.
Between 1999 and 2000, four of Lukashenko’s political opponents went missing (PDF): former Interior Minister Yury Zakharanka; lawmaker Viktar Hanchar and his friend, businessman Anatol Krasowski; and journalist Dzmitry Zavadski. An exiled member of an elite unit targeting gangs in 2019 admitted to taking part in three of their abductions and murders. Lukashenko appointed loyalists to senior positions, both within the security forces and state-run industries. But it seems that he does not fully trust them. Lukashenko absolutely hates people who can be in some position of authority, and so he is constantly engaged in the rotation of personnel. The oppositionists deprecatingly call him an "agriculturist." However, the President prides himself upon having devoted a lot of efforts to the agrarian production and to the people of rural areas. "All of us come from villages, he often underscores. - Those, who do not feel their motherly land heart in their hearts, those, who are nothing more but "pavement tramplers," will never gain an understanding of the life's problems. A.G. Lukashenko is proud of being called "batka" (dad) by the people, such an address having always been used with respect to authoritative people.
Lukashenka during his first term routinely staged public humiliations of cabinet ministers and other officials, settling scores during televised conferences that showed him berating his victims for perceived economic and political errors. Often he pinned blame on them for his own fallacious decisions. At one such public display of opprobrium, Lukashenka went so far as to stage a minister's "spontaneous" dismissal, complete with handcuffs and immediate arrest.
Ordinary Belarusians watched such live programs with tremendous excitement. Lukashenka came over as a fantastic hero-leader, brandishing a sword of retribution over the heads of those they saw as their real oppressors. It was during this period that Belarusians first began to refer to their president as Batska, or "father" in Belarusian. His tough-guy approach to politics had strong appeal for a society craving authority and a firm hand -- the same society that had been overwhelmingly rural and patriarchal only a half-century ago.
Lukashenka skillfully managed and minimized dissent and opposition with an ever-changing kaleidoscope of sticks and carrots. He appoints and retains officials at all levels based on their personal loyalty to him. Officials have learned to maintain a low profile and eschew interviews. Even people who follow the region closely would be hard-pressed to name any Belarusian official other than Lukashenka. He has avoided creating a ruling political party, a politburo, or any other form of institutionalized authoritarianism that could emerge as a threat.
Significant human rights issues included: unlawful or arbitrary killings by security forces; torture in detention facilities and cases of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or detainees; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression, the press, and the internet, including violence, threats of violence, or unjustified arrests or prosecutions against journalists, censorship, site blocking, internet blockages, and the existence of laws regarding criminal libel, slander, and defamation of government officials.
His authoritarian streak stretched to his views on women and even some aspects of his personal life. Lukashenko's latest election declaration said that he is still legally married but few can recall ever seeing the wife he wed in 1975. He has said that Belarus could not possibly have a woman leader because she "would collapse, poor thing." Amnesty International had accused Lukashenko's government of "misogyny" and targeting female activists with discriminatory tactics. He concluded a 2012 argument over rights with Germany's openly gay former foreign minister Guido Westerwelle by saying: "Better to be a dictator than gay."
This machismo is accompanied by a rural folksiness that appealed to voters who were used to the stiff octogenarians that dominated Soviet political life around the time of the superpower's collapse in 1991. Lukashenko likes being filmed driving tractors or picking watermelons and potatoes. He once gave US action actor Steven Seagal a carrot that he cleaned himself with a peeler and joined Putin at amateur ice hockey matches.
In September 2001 Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko was reelected President of the Republic of Belarus by the overwhelming majority of votes (75.65%). Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko scored a victory at the elections in March 2006, in which 83 percent of the electors voted in his favor, and he was reelected as the Head of the Belarusian State.
Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko was inaugurated in a brief, highly orchestrated and sparsely attended ceremony in Minsk 08 April 2006. As required by the Constitution, he recited the oath in poorly accented Belarusian, one of the very rare instances when Lukashenko has spoken the language. Lukashenko speaks Russian wherever he talks. Lukashenko speaks Russian and a Belarusian patois rather than formal Belarusian.
Lukashenka declared himself the victor of the 2010 presidential election, claiming 80% of the vote. However, the vote count was declared by the OSCE/ODIHR election monitoring mission to have been “bad and very bad in almost half of all observed polling stations.” Consequently, the United States Government does not recognize these results as legitimate.
The next presidential vote was due in 2020 and in Belarus, as in all hybrid authoritarian regimes, election season is always a potential crisis. Two years younger than Putin, Lukashenka turned 65 in August. He appeared to be in good health and to lead a healthy lifestyle -- an example he frequently urged Belarusians to follow. He has said the election will be held, and he seems certain to secure a sixth presidential term. Nonetheless, after 25 years of Lukashenka, many in the region are wondering what comes next for Belarus.
The country experienced massive civil unrest following the 09 August 2020 presidential election as demonstrators protested widespread vote rigging by Lukashenka as well as the government’s widespread use of brute force against and detentions of peaceful protesters. Weekly protests drawing at their peak up to hundreds of thousands of protesters began election night and continued through the end of the year.
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