The last time Belarusians voted in a presidential election in August 2020, an unprecedented fervor swept the country. For the first time since Alexander Lukashenko came to power in 1994, they saw the hope of change in the candidacy of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who replaced her husband, blogger Sergei Tsikhanovsky, on short notice after he was imprisoned during the campaign.

Winner of a rigged election, the autocrat is still in power four and a half years later. The tens of thousands of protesters who took to the streets in the summer of 2020 to condemn the fraud were brutally repressed. Political opposition was jailed or forced into exile, civil society was crushed, and terror became the rule in this former Soviet republic of a population of 9 million. Repression was further intensified after Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, drawing Belarus, a key Moscow ally, into co-belligerence.

In this dark context, Belarusians are once again called to vote in a presidential election, on Sunday, January 26. Lukashenko, 70, is seeking a seventh term against four candidates, all of whom publicly support his regime. Voting will take place with no international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. There is no doubt about the outcome. It will likely hand another victory to the authoritarian leader, who owes his political survival to Vladimir Putin.

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