‘Europe’s last dictator’ faces a fight for power like never before

For 26 years, Alexander Lukashenko has pulled off a remarkable balancing act: between Europe and Russia; eccentricity and terror; a Soviet command economy and hi-tech globalisation. But with presidential elections a little over a week away, the man who has revelled in “last dictator of Europe” epithets – “it’s better to be a dictator than gay”, he once said – is looking decidedly wobbly on his high wire.

On Thursday, the capital of Belarus witnessed the largest opposition protest since the fall of the Soviet Union. Perhaps 70,000 people turned out in Minsk against their authoritarian leader to offer support for unity opposition candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who until a few weeks ago was a stay-at-home mother and who only emerged after the arrest of key candidates, including her husband.

The protesters constituted 5 per cent of the capital’s electorate – remarkable given the historical dangers still associated with opposition. That context would appear to be the main explanation for the bizarre but equally dramatic “Russian terror plot” that the Belarusian president claimed to have foiled earlier this week.

Since coming to power on an anti-corruption ticket in 1994, Lukashenko, a former collective farm manager, has fine-tuned a system of modern authoritarianism.

From the very start, he seized control of the budget and key institutions, from mainstream media to the courts and election commissions. His regime made people pay the highest of prices for dissent. Rivals found themselves accused of terrorism. Some disappeared or died in strange circumstances. Hundreds were imprisoned in cells, often alongside convicted murderers.

However, Lukashenko’s Belarus always had a flip side: relative stability, well-maintained infrastructure, and wages and pensions paid on time. The autocrat delighted in favourable comparisons with the chaos and corruption of neighbouring post-Soviet states. What he often failed to mention was just how much of his social contract was being sustained by a deal with Russia for cheap crude oil. That deal caused considerable headaches as soon as it began to unravel.

It’s hard to say just how popular Lukashenko’s rule has been over the years because independent polling is all but illegal. It is clear he has enjoyed the support of significant parts of the population – though probably some way short of the claimed results, ranging from three-quarters of the vote to 84 per cent. Leaked exit polls from the 2010 election indicated a likely markup, suggesting he got about 40 per cent – about half that claimed by election authorities.

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Lukashenko himself, remarkably, owned up to falsifying the 2010 results. “President Lukashenko got 93.5 per cent of the vote,” he said. “But people said it wasn’t a European enough figure, so we made it a bit less.”

This time around, the president will have some job persuading his fellow countryman that the level of his declared support is real.

To understand the trouble he finds himself in, it helps to look at what gave him power in the first place.

Part of his control came from his major achievement: delivering a scale model of the Soviet control economy without the Soviet Union. Lukashenko went against the grain of mainstream economics here, but ordinary Belarusians, who voted overwhelmingly against the end of the Soviet Union, largely endorsed his conservative vision.

At one point, 80 per cent of the Belarusian economy was controlled by the state, though his regime later diversified by encouraging the growth of private hi-tech industries.

The second, and not unconnected, point was his success at playing Russia off the west and vice versa, often to the exasperation of both.

Lukashenko’s first 15 years in power saw him establish ever closer relationships with Belarus’s eastern neighbour. In 1997, he signed the Union State agreement with Boris Yeltsin’s Russia, hoping no doubt to lead it at some future point. In 2014, in an interview with the Russian socialite Kseniya Sobchak, he described Belarus as a “pro-Russian province” already in Moscow’s possession.

The courtship had an obvious economic aim. Over decades, the wily Lukashenko carved out access to the Russian market alongside billions of dollars annually of preferential subsidies. He secured a deal that allowed Belarus to refine cheap Russian oil and sell it on at a huge profit.

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But the relationship between Minsk and Moscow has frayed in recent years. For some time, the Kremlin has seen Lukashenko as an unreliable negotiator, believing it is not getting enough in return for its subsidies, and was angered by his equivocal position on Crimea. Minsk, meanwhile, has become increasingly concerned about the intentions of its eastern “brother” following wars in Georgia and Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to walk back many of the oil subsidies over the past decade left the Belarusian economy teetering on collapse, and most acutely in the last three years. That was the unfortunate backdrop leading into this year – and before the appearance of the coronavirus.

Across the world, the pandemic has tested the most flexible and forward-looking of leaders. For the analogue dictator in Minsk, it has presented a challenge of the most critical proportions.

Apparently acting out of a fear that the Belarusian economy could not cope with a sustained shutdown, although never publicly admitting as much, Lukashenko initially denied the dangers. Fear of the virus amounted to a “psychosis,” he would claim, and the coronavirus could easily be fought with vodka, regular trips to the sauna, and work in the field.

The president controversially went ahead with a Second World War victory parade at the height of the pandemic on 9 May, even as Moscow cancelled its own. He referred to masks as “muzzles”.

It is hard to know, given the unreliability of statistics, just how many avoidable deaths resulted from Lukashenko’s decision to keep the country open. But what is indisputable is that criticism of his handling of the response runs deep. Speaking with The Independent earlier this week, Tikhanovskaya, now his main rival at next week’s elections, said the episode served as a “wake-up call” for Belarusians.

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“People saw how the government didn’t care about them,” she said. “They may have been more forgiving had he he come clean and said, ‘OK, we have Covid, but we can’t close everything down because of the economy.’”

Tikhanovskaya’s unexpectedly strong challenge has brought forward a fundamental conflict at the heart of Belarus: between the Soviet generation that Lukashenko represents and a more outward-looking, globalised younger population.

In entirely fair circumstances, it would be a fascinating fight, with the latter likely having every chance of winning. But this is Belarus, and despite the energy of the opposition campaign, no one has cancelled the security state.

When overwhelming victory is declared on 9 August, as it no doubt will be, it seems likely that equally energetic protests will follow. It is hard to see them ending well.