THE LAST time that Belarus held an election, in August 2020, Alexander Lukashenko was embarrassed. After decades of successful vote rigging, Belarusians seemed determined to call time on his dictatorship. During the campaign they turned up in droves to support Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, a former teacher who was standing in place of her vlogger husband after he had been arrested.

She was awarded just 9.9% of the official vote; most analysts believe that she actually won. One in five adults in cities took to the streets in protest. Over 35,000 people were detained. Since then, some 500,000 people have fled Belarus, including Ms Tikhavoskaya, who now lives in exile in neighbouring Lithuania

Belarusians will return to the polls on February 25th for parliamentary and local elections. This time, Mr Lukashenko is leaving even less to chance. Turnout thresholds have been abolished. Voting from abroad is banned. Just four parties, all of them pro-regime, are on the ballot. Mr Lukashenko, who is 69, is looking to the future. Last month, he granted himself lifelong immunity from prosecution and a permanent seat in parliament.

Mr Lukashenko has doubled down on political repression since the 2020 election. Last month over 300 people were detained. Roughly 1,430 people are currently locked up on politically motivated charges, according to Viasna, a human-rights organisation. Several, including Ms Tikhavoskaya’s husband, and Maria Kolesnikova, a pro-democracy activist, have been cut off from outside contact for over a year. At least three people have died in custody since 2020.

Civil society is virtually dead. Almost all independent media outlets have been banned and forced into exile. Around 35 journalists are in jail. The authorities continue to crack down on the slightest murmurs of dissent. A quarter of all lawyers have had their licences revoked since 2020, some just for liking a social-media post. Recently, Mr Lukashenko has targeted Belarusians in exile. New laws allow authorities to strip them of their citizenship and deny them passport renewals, leaving many at risk of being stateless. “He transforms his fear into repressions,” says Ms Tikhavoskaya.

Vladimir Putin has bankrolled Mr Lukashenko’s crackdown. The Kremlin loaned him $1.5bn to help stamp out protests in 2020. Cheap loans and energy from Russia have kept the Belarusian economy afloat, even as Western sanctions have been ramped up. After years of successive decline, Belarus’ GDP grew at an annual rate of 3.5% over the first nine months of 2023. A true “union state” between Russia and Belarus, which was first agreed in 1999, is now closer than ever. The two countries are working to merge their lists of “extremists” and to unify their economic and military strategies.  “Lukashenko has nowhere else to go apart from Moscow,” explains Nigel Gould-Davies from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank.

Once careful to avoid excessive dependence on Russia, Mr Lukashenko has burnt all bridges with Europe and America. In 2021 Belarus forced a Ryanair plane on its way to Lithuania to land in order to arrest a journalist on board. In the same year it began forcing migrants across the border into Poland, Latvia and Lithuania. More problematic in the West’s eyes is his stance on Ukraine. In 2014, Mr Lukashenko refused to recognise Russia’s annexation of Crimea. But 2020 has forced him to change tack. In 2022 he allowed Russia to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine through Belarus. Since then he has agreed to host Wagner Group mercenaries and Russian tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory. Belarusian opposition figures have gathered evidence that over 2,100 Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied cities have been forcibly removed to Belarus.

There are limits to the closeness of this union, however. The vast majority of Belarusians oppose active participation in the war in Ukraine, according to polls commissioned by Chatham House, a think-tank. Though Russian support has so far propped up Belarusian business, the economy looks set to dip this year. That is a problem for the dictator. Maintaining adequate living standards and decent public infrastructure has been his method of sustaining public acceptance of his regime. He is now reaching out to autocratic friends, including China, Iran, North Korea and Saudi Arabia, to fill the void created by Western sanctions.■