Svetlana Tikhanovskaya appears at polling station in election Lukashenko is expected to win
Belarusians have gone to the polls in presidential elections that have prompted the country’s largest opposition political rallies since the fall of the Soviet Union.
Alexander Lukashenko, who has consolidated immense power over his 26 years in office, is expected to claim victory after Sunday’s polls, but anger over vote rigging is likely to trigger a backlash.
The opposition candidate for president was forced to go into hiding the night before challenging the country’s longtime leader in the country’s most unpredictable election in a generation.
Candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya left her apartment after police detained two senior staffers and seven other campaign members in what they called an attempt to scare the opposition before the crucial vote.
She re-emerged on Sunday afternoon at a polling station alongside an entourage of campaign staffers and journalists who were there for her safety.
“We can’t defend ourselves physically against armed people or the security services,” said Anna Krasulina, her press secretary, in an interview. “This is the most trustworthy defence we have.”
Sparring with journalists at a Minsk polling station, Lukashenko played down the threat from a united opposition. “They’re not even worth launching reprisals against,” he said.
In a final appeal before the vote, Tikhanovskaya condemned security services for arresting peaceful demonstrators and called on troops deployed across the city “not to carry out criminal orders”.
“We need changes,” she said in a YouTube video filmed in front of a bay of shuttered windows. “We need a new president.”
Squares near government buildings have been cordoned off and armed troops have appeared at highway entrances to Minsk. Lukashenko, who was subjected to sanctions by the US and the EU for the government’s heavy-handed crackdown on the opposition after elections in 2010, warned that illegal protests will be met with force.
At Minsk’s Belarusian State Economic University, voters streamed into two polling stations on Sunday morning from the capital’s unusually quiet streets. Viktor Chonovoy, a vote monitor for the organisation Honest People, was perched on a red plastic chair peering through a window at the ballot box and tallying turnout.
“Nobody is letting me monitor [the vote],” he said. “It is just pro-government monitors replacing one another.” He said that the early voting results showing 642 ballots cast was more than double the actual number of voters, indicating ballot stuffing.
Pro-Tikhanovskaya voters said they wanted to see change, a popular slogan for the campaign, or thought that Lukashenko had overstayed his time in office. Many were pessimistic about the chances of the vote being counted fairly.
“I want a new government but that’s not going to happen,” said Vadim, a pensioner, who wore a white ribbon on his arm and said he was voting for Tikhanovskaya. “If Lukashenko loses power, then it’s obvious where he will end up.”
Elena said: “I’m going to vote not for Lukashenko, not because I consider him a bad president, he’s done much good for the country, but I think that two presidential terms of five years is enough.” Lukashenko is seeking a sixth term in office. “He’s sat for long enough.”
Supporters of the government said they wanted to preserve stability under Lukashenko’s strong leadership or were concerned with preserving government benefits.
“We want stability, calm, to keep everything good that we’ve got,” said one pensioner going to vote for Lukashenko. “Of course I’m voting for Lukashenko, there’s no one else to vote for.”
There were already signs of a crackdown heading into the vote. On Saturday evening, riot police in balaclavas made arrests to break up impromptu demonstrations against Lukashenko. Pro-Lukashenko adverts on state television showed chaotic scenes of “colour revolutions” from other post-Soviet states.
Local journalists reported problems with Telegram, Twitter, Viber, WhatsApp, and websites associated with opposition parties and platforms for monitoring the vote. Netblocks, a civil society group, reported that internet connectivity had been “significantly disrupted in Belarus amid presidential elections”.
Lukashenko is facing unprecedented anger over his handling of the economy and a bungled coronavirus response. Before the elections he has jailed opposition candidates and targeted foreign allies, accusing Moscow of sending mercenaries to destabilise the country.
Tikhanovskaya was initially a stand-in candidate for her husband, a popular YouTuber jailed in spring by the authorities. She has grown into an effective campaigner, attracting more than 63,000 people to a campaign rally last month in Minsk, and thousands more in small cities and towns usually dominated by Lukashenko. She has been joined onstage by two other female politicians in a “trio” that has transformed the image of the country’s male-dominated politics.
Tikhanovskaya has said that she does not want to remain in power if she wins, promising to hold free elections within six months, release political prisoners, and return the country’s pre-1996 constitution that limited presidents to two terms in office.
More than 40% of Belarusians were reported to have already cast ballots in early voting, an unprecedented number that critics say indicate ballot stuffing by the government. The government, meanwhile, has lashed back at efforts to tally the vote.
“They accost voters,” said Lidia Yermoshina, the head of Belarus’s elections commissions since Lukashenko’s first victory in 1996. “These are not fighters for democracy. These are people hired by the campaign of a criminal banker.”
One monitor, Anastasia Kadomskaya, 30, said she had managed to count turnout at her Minsk polling station by sitting in front of an open door in view of the ballot box. She said that her polling station’s official turnout matched her own tally of around 17%, less than half of the national average. “You feel colossal pressure and stress at every moment because you have to keep defending your right to watch the vote as a citizen and observer,” she said in an interview.
The opposition has said it will challenge vote rigging at polling stations but has stopped short of calling supporters out on to the streets. “We’re not calling people to a maidan,” Tikhanovskaya told Belarusian news site Tut.by in an interview published on Friday, referring to the 2014 revolution in Ukraine. “We want honest elections. Is that a crime?”