Early Voting in Belarus Has Begun for the Presidential Election, with the Official Voting Day Scheduled for January 26. The Election Commission has set up over 5,000 polling stations across the country.
Five candidates have been cleared to run by the election authorities, including the incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko, Oleg Gaidukevich, Anna Kanopatskaya, Alexander Chishchenko, and Sergei Syrnikov. According to the election commission, these candidates have collected the required 100,000 signatures for registration, with Lukashenko submitting more than 2.5 million signatures. If he wins, it would be his seventh term in office for the next five years, a tenure that has spanned since 1994.
In an interview, the 70-year-old Lukashenko acknowledged that he has no time to engage in debates, emphasizing that actions, not words, are now needed to move the country forward and tackle its challenges.
The foreign minister and the head of the Central Election Commission have both stated that they do not want to see OSCE election observers in the country. Additionally, Belarusian citizens living abroad will not be allowed to vote.
The opposition has repeatedly called for the elections to be boycotted, with Poland’s President Andrzej Duda describing the vote as a fraud, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken labeling the upcoming presidential election neither free nor fair.
The last presidential election in August 2020 led to the country’s largest protests in history, followed by repression. Officially, the election commission reported that Lukashenko won the election with 80.2% of the vote, but the opposition refused to recognize the result, demanding a recount. Lukashenko characterized the protests as externally orchestrated. Thousands of demonstrators were reportedly arrested, with many later released. After the election, Lukashenko’s challenger, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, emigrated to Lithuania and was later sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison. Her husband, another presidential candidate, was arrested before the registration process and later sentenced to 18 years in prison. Viktor Babariko, another presidential candidate who was not cleared to run, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.