The parliamentary and local council elections held in Belarus last week were its first since the 2020 crisis, when huge protests against electoral fraud rocked the country following a presidential vote, only to be brutally crushed. Despite this, the recent campaign proved to be utterly unnoteworthy and dull, even by the standards of Alexander Lukashenko’s thirty-year rule. The procedure was devoid of any intrigue at all stages.
These elections were never going to have any political import, since both local authorities and the Belarusian parliament are powerless institutions. The imminent establishment in April of a new super-body—the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly—diminishes the role of parliament even further.
Nevertheless, the authorities were still nervous ahead of the vote. It was important for the system to prove to itself that it has bounced back after the shock of 2020 and is ready for next year’s presidential election.
The Belarusian authorities began preparing for this parliamentary campaign back during the 2022 referendum on adopting a new constitution. Ahead of that vote, the opposition had called for people to spoil their ballots by choosing both options—“for” and “against”—and then sending photo evidence to a bot created for that purpose on the Telegram messaging app. The authorities responded by detaining on the spot people seen trying to photograph their ballot.
By 2023, a new version of electoral legislation prohibited taking photos of ballot papers. The decision was also taken not to open polling stations in embassies abroad, so as not to provide the growing Belarusian diaspora with natural assembly points for protests. In addition, the names of election commission members were no longer published, to avoid public pressure being applied to them.
Last summer, the authorities liquidated all opposition and superfluous pro-government parties, whittling the total number down to four. Previously, registered parties could nominate candidates for elections directly, which had enabled the opposition to at least get on the ballot and have a few weeks of relative freedom to campaign.
Now, independent candidates were not even permitted to get to the stage of collecting signatures in support of their candidacy (a bureaucratic prerequisite for people from unregistered parties and individual activists—anyone who wants to run on their own). The only well-known activist who tried to do so, the former leader of the Green Party Dzmitry Kuchuk, was removed from the race at a preliminary stage.
Last week’s elections were also the first to which Minsk did not invite observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe: something even secretive Turkmenistan does. Elections in Belarus have always fallen far short of democratic standards, but the presence of Western observers showed that Minsk still considered itself part of the broader European space. Now Lukashenko has apparently given up on trying to legitimize either these elections or his regime as a whole in the West.
The campaign’s significance, therefore, was exclusively domestic, if not purely psychological. Lukashenko wanted to both ascertain for himself and show Belarusians that the events of 2020 were an aberration and nothing more. Almost four years later, people have come to their senses and returned to the electoral fold, and the system is once again running smoothly.
The extent to which Lukashenko now fears even the slightest electoral experiment is reflected in the final list of winners. Even the newly created party of power, Belaya Rus, did not win a majority in the new parliament, receiving just fifty-one of 110 seats. Another nineteen went to the three spoiler parties, leaving forty for non-party members. In other words, the government was not prepared to strengthen any alternative institution within the system, even ones—like Belaya Rus—assembled from absolute loyalists within a purely decorative body.
Despite the predictability of the election results, the authorities weren’t taking any chances. Since the fall, the degree of repression in the country—already sky high—was ramped up, with waves of arrests in the regions and at individual enterprises for “offenses” as trivial as subscribing to online opposition channels. The security forces also carried out raids and interrogations of former observers to deter them from repeating their efforts this time around.
On the eve of the vote, a special forces training exercise was conducted in front of TV cameras and senior officials in which the commandos detained a voter photographing a ballot paper, dispersed people gathered in “artificial lines” in front of a polling station, and stormed a polling center through the windows as if it were a terrorist stronghold.
The authorities threatened to use all the means at their disposal to maintain order at the polling stations, from youth organization vigilantes to Wagner mercenaries who moved to Belarus after last year’s failed mutiny in Russia.
Lukashenko also began to warn of new terrorist threats ahead of the vote, and ordered armed street patrols during the elections. All of this escalation looked a lot like overkill: the protest potential in Belarus was suffocated long ago by reprisals on an unprecedented scale.
For the Belarusian authorities, however, the source of political threats is always outside the country. Accordingly, it doesn’t matter what state society is in now: Minsk still has external enemies who will use every opportunity to repeat 2020, so every possible weak spot must be shored up.
This rehearsal for the 2025 presidential election leaves no doubt as to how the next campaign will go. The decades-long cycle of Belarusian politics has been broken.
Presidential election campaigns ended in mass protests three times: in 2006, 2010, and 2020. Those protests were followed by years of repression, before an eventual thaw, which in turn made it possible for people to mobilize around new opposition leaders. There were no protests in 2015, and liberalization began immediately after the elections.
Now that pendulum has stopped. Elections in autocracies can only be used to mobilize people onto the streets or for protest voting if the government leaves at least some oxygen in the system: if it eases up on the repression before the election, permits some outside candidates to register, or allows in observers who can record violations, thereby giving society a reason to be outraged.
The kind of elections now taking place in Belarus no longer leave room for such opportunities. The opposition can call on supporters to spoil their ballots, vote for spoiler candidates or against everyone, but no one—including the authorities—will know the outcomes of such campaigns, because there will be no one to record them. The necessary figures will be obtained right at the precinct level, and there will be no one to challenge them or establish the scale of falsification.
Elections that are as close as possible in form and content to the Soviet–Chinese model no longer hold any significance for the West as an indicator of Lukashenko’s greater or lesser international legitimacy. Change will only be possible in two eventualities: a power transition in Minsk, or if Belarus emerges from Russian control. Neither option looks likely in the foreseeable future.
