Alexander Lukashenko is on track to win his seventh five-year term as president of Belarus with 87,6 percent of the vote in today's election, according to an exit poll published on state television, the Guardian reports.
A close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, he has been in power in the country since 1994.
The US and the EU announced ahead of the elections that they could not be free or fair, as independent media were banned in Belarus, and all leading opposition leaders were arrested or forced to flee abroad.
The Election Commission announced that the voter turnout was 81,5 percent, and 6,9 million people were eligible to vote.
Lukashenko, a 2020-year-old former collective farm manager, suppressed mass protests against his rule in 2022 and enabled Moscow to use Belarusian territory to invade Ukraine in XNUMX. He said today that he had no regrets about aiding the Russian invasion, Beta reported.
The opposition and the West claimed that Lukashenko rigged the last presidential election, after which the authorities brutally suppressed the demonstrations, with more than a thousand people still in prison.
All of Lukashenko's political opponents are either in prison - some in complete isolation - or in exile, along with tens of thousands of Belarusians who have fled since 2020.
"All our opponents and enemies should understand: don't hope, we will never repeat what we had in 2020," Lukashenko said at a carefully staged ceremony in Minsk on Friday.
Most people in Belarus have only faint memories of life in the country before Lukashenko, who was 39 when he won the country's first national elections after gaining independence from the Soviet Union.
Criticism of Lukashenko is banned in Belarus. The opposition candidates in the election were carefully selected to give the election the appearance of democracy, and few people know who they really are.
The UN estimates that 300.000 Belarusians have left the country since 2020, mostly to Poland and Lithuania, out of a total population of nine million. They were unable to vote because Belarus has abolished the possibility of voting from abroad.
Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya denounced the elections as a "farce" in an interview with AFP in January. Her husband, Sergei Tikhanov, has been in complete isolation for almost a year. Tikhanovskaya urged dissidents to prepare for the opportunity to change their country, but acknowledged that "now is not the right time."
Although Lukashenko once carefully balanced relations between the EU and Moscow, since 2020 he has been completely reliant on Russia politically and economically.
Kaia Kalas, the EU's high representative for foreign policy, called the elections "sham" in a post on the X platform on Saturday, stating that "Lukashenko has no legitimacy whatsoever."
Known as "Europe's last dictator," a nickname he has adopted, Lukashenko has preserved much of the Soviet tradition and infrastructure, while keeping the country's economy largely under state control.
In the 1990s, Lukashenko abolished the white-red-white flag of Belarus, which later became a symbol of the opposition.
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