Paul Niland argues that the popular protests against President Lukashenko are the beginning of a popular revolution against injustice which could follow the model of Ukraine
The President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has been at the country’s helm for 26 years. He has earned himself many nicknames in that period.
He is often referred to as the ‘Belarus strongman’, but there is little evidence that he is strong. He is occasionally referred to as ‘Europe’s last dictator’, but that title arguably belongs to Vladimir Putin as the Kremlin is firmly located in the European part of Russia. More recently, Lukashenko has carried the nickname ‘Sasha 3%’. This title, fittingly, came from his own country folk.
‘Sasha’ is the diminutive form of the male name Alexander or the female name Alexandra. The 3% refers to the real level of support Lukashenko is estimated to have from Belarus’ citizens. The moniker is at least a month old – at least as long as the people of Belarus have been expecting, and preparing for, a rigged Presidential Election.
The truth, though, is that the seeds of revolution were sown a long time ago.
Preconditions of Revolution
From the protests in America’s Portland to Kyiv in Ukraine and Beiruit in Lebanon to Minsk, the cause is the same: deep-seated injustices.
Autocrats gradually chip away at the rights and freedoms of people.
Small and imperceptible changes here and there are not enough in and of themselves to start a revolution, but they cause grievances that fester over time. Eventually there is a catalyst; something that takes on a life of its own.
Such tactics that form part of the mythical ‘strongman’ image are, when you examine them, actually signs of weakness and fear.
In Belarus yesterday, the catalyst was the blatant rigging of a ballot to determine whether Lukashenko remains President for a sixth term. Voters clearly called for change, so the response from the authorities in Minsk – and Moscow – was to ignore the will of the people.
Lukashenko would stay on, they decided, and he was declared the winner of the 2020 Presidential Election with an 80% landslide in official results.
Going back some years, I had family in Belarus. Back then, they were satisfied with the social contract. ‘Batka’ (‘the father’) Lukashenko took care of things. The streets were clean. There was order. As long as people got on with their lives and didn’t challenge the authorities and their schemes, they were unlikely to see any kind of serious harm, though inequality throughout society was rife.
That unfairness, according to the thinking of the residents of this former Soviet republic, was just part of how life works. In the early days of mobile communications and prior to anything other than state-run media, keeping a population in the dark and eroding democratic norms was much easier. When Lukashenko changed the Constitution in order to drop presidential term limits, for example, this was treated as a welcome step along the path towards some fabled goal of ‘stability’.
Now, the people of Belarus have woken up to the fact that they have sleepwalked their way into a dictatorship. Whatever pretence there may have been of something resembling democracy from the regular charades of being permitted to vote on things, that was an illusion.
Vote Rigging & the Tsikhanouski Effect
The practicalities of how to rig an election are multi-faceted and, in recent months and weeks, Lukashenko – in tandem with his revolution-phobic Russian counterpart Putin – have been devising all kinds of means to ensure they would know the result in advance.
Some of the tricks have been as crude as disbarring certain candidates and throwing dissenters in jail.
This is precisely what happened a few months ago when Syarhei Tsikhanouski, a YouTube blogger, was arrested following his 7 May announcement that he planned to stand against Lukashenko for the presidency. At the time, his channel had 140,000 subscribers; within a month it had almost doubled.
Lukashenko calculated that removing his opponent would be the end of the Tsikhanouski challenge – but he was wrong.
Next came Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who decided that she would step into her husband’s shoes in challenging Lukashenko.