LUKASHENKO WON A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN BELARUS

On August 9, the presidential elections were held in Belarus, after which the CEC has announced the victory of the current head of the republic. Of course, no one expected any surprises - the rule of Alexander Lukashenko has been going on for many years now, and the political elites, as it seems, are not planning to change their “father”.

However, the electoral process this time turned out to be unusual. The experts note that the country has not known such massive protests against the government yet, since thousands of citizens took to the streets.

First of all, the pandemic, against the background of which the campaign took place, made its own adjustments. While the head of state was convincing the residents of the country that neither he nor anyone else should be threatened by the coronavirus, his opponents thought otherwise.   

Lukashenko managed to hold an open victory parade on June 9, organize a volunteer clean-up and talk to a crowd of people, after which he declared that he had had an infection without any symptoms.

Such an attitude angered not only the opposition, but also a significant part of the state apparatus, albeit in a hidden form.

Secondly, the candidates running for the post of the head of state, as a result, turned out to be rather curious. For the first time, the representatives of the very elite, who know that such a step usually does not end well better than others, made a decision to participate in the elections. They turned out to be Viktor Babariko and Valery Tsepkalo. The first had been in charge of Belgazprombank for many years, the second was a diplomat and the head of HTP (High Technology Park). The current government promptly did not allow both of them to take part in the elections, having refused to register them as the candidates. Babariko was arrested on the charges of accepting a bribe, and Tsepkalo managed to escape from the country with his family.

At that time, no one expected that a woman would declare her right to the presidency.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya managed to unite a part of the protest electorate, having gathered the headquarters of the disgraced politicians under her banners. The alliance with musician Maria Kolesnikova (the head of Babariko's headquarters) and business woman Veronika Tsepkalo made it possible for the first time to declare that Belarus is a modern country in which women can succeed in what men usually did not succeed in: in coming to an agreement. As a result, more than 60 thousand citizens took part in a rally organized by the headquarters of Tikhanovskaya in the capital of the republic.

The 2020 elections will undoubtedly go down in recent history with mass arrests and detentions of both local activists and the representatives of foreign media. The detention of Russian journalists seemed to Lukashenko an insufficiently clear demonstration of force. As a result, the official media began to actively relish the message of the republic's KGB about the "militants of the Wagner PMCs" who have Russian citizenship and the presence of about 170 militants on the territory of the state intending to organize the riots.

The Russian "trail" in general turned out to be very useful for Lukashenko in the current campaign.

The President, who collaborated with Moscow and opposed his brotherly friendship to the negative image of the West at every election, has unexpectedly changed the vector of his political speeches. The main tone of the speeches was the accusation of the union state in an attempt to organize a color revolution in the country. The accusations of Russia in the interfering in the electoral process by sending in the “puppeteers” from the Gazprom company poured in one after another. Against this background, the problems with the work of the Internet due to the alleged DoS attack no longer looked like something out of the ordinary. It was clear that the elections would take place even before August 9th.

Early voting has showed such a turnout that one could just slide by the ballot boxes on the day of the official election.

In Gomel region alone, more than 50% of the electorate voted in advance. But when the long queues formed at some of the polling stations, and suddenly there were not enough ballots for voting on the 9th, it became clear that the matter was not clean. As a result, the heads of the neighboring states - Poland and Lithuania, hoping for the integration of Belarus with the European Union, hastened to jointly call on Minsk to observe the human rights. However, the use of rubber bullets and stun grenades in Minsk was not stopped by such statements.