The woman seeking to overthrow Europe’s “last dictator” is a 37-year-old English teacher described as an “accidental Joan of Arc” who ran for the presidency of Belarus after her husband was arrested and excluded from the May elections.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s unlikely rise to political fame posed the greatest challenge to strongman leader Alexander Lukashenko in his 26 years in power.
After participating in the race and moving his two children for his own safety, he told his followers that “I don’t need forceArray … I need my children and my husband back and I need to follow my chops.”
But now he says he is in a position to take hold if Lukashenko is overthrown through the massive protests that have engulfed the former Soviet country since either applicant won the disputed elections on August 9.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya voted in the Belarusian presidential election last week, following an unlikely political fame after her husband’s arrest and imprisonment.
Tikhanovskaya poses for a selfie with a supporter at an election rally in Baranovichi, a week of the disputed presidential election in Belarus.
Svetlana ran for the presidency after her husband, blogger Sergei Tikhanovsky, 41 (pictured at a rally in May), was arrested and excluded from the poll.
Tikhanovskaya was born in 1982 in Mikashevichi, a small town south of Minsk in what was then the Soviet Union.
In his youth, he spent several summers in the Republic of Ireland as part of a charity programme for young people living near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
The explosion took place in northern Ukraine and pollution in Belarus, affecting thousands of people.
After the fall of communism, Tikhanovskaya studied an English and German instructor in the historic town of Mozyr in southern Belarus.
In Mozyr, she met her husband Sergey, who owned a nightclub in the city.
After applying as an English instructor and translator, she retired from her career to care for the couple’s two young children, now over five and ten.
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Edited through Associated Newspapers Ltd
Part of the Daily Mail, The Mail on Sunday and Metro Media Group