BELARUS: People decry a stolen election
Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus, must have expected the August presidential election to be business as usual. After all, he has been president since 1994, when he won the country’s first vote since the break-up of the Soviet Union. But in 2020, not all went to plan as a credible opposition candidate emerged.
When the results were announced in Lukashenko’s favour, people knew the election had been blatantly stolen. Protests were sustained, in spite of attempts to suppress them with violence and detentions.
Every time we see the protests calming down, the government behaves in a way that society finds unacceptable, and protests continue. One of the problems for the current government is that we are past the point when it was possible to bring everything back to what it used to be. We will not allow the authoritarian regime to remain in place for another 10 years.
Nikolai Kvantaliani
