Ciara Rushton | News Contributor
In the wake of the 2025 re-election of Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko, opposition to the regime from within the country seems to have reached a standstill. Since the peak of Lukashenko’s vulnerability after the protests following the 2020 election, experts have sought to understand why the anti-regime movement in Belarus has gone from its strongest point since the early 1990s to having been effectively quashed. Experts have analysed internal developments in Belarus since 2020, arguing that these demonstrate that Lukashenko has mobilised the repressive apparatus of the Belarusian state on an unprecedented scale in the country’s history. Through ruthless repression, he secured his path to victory in 2025 without the challenges the regime suffered five years prior.
In August 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, the world watched as the largest anti-government protests in Belarus’s post-Soviet history unfolded. The protests were led by independent presidential candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who claimed the 2020 election had been rigged against her. Opposition sources reported that over 250,000 people took to the streets on August 23 in the capital city of Minsk alone. Groups that had historically supported Lukashenko, such as pensioners and public sector factory workers, unexpectedly joined with the predominately university-educated urban opposition. The protestors argued that the 81% share of the vote reported by the Belarusian Central Election Commission was unfathomably high and could not be legitimate. Observers predicted that Lukashenko may fall and Belarusian democracy was on the horizon.
In response to these protests, the government reacted sharply. Tsikhanouskaya and other opposition leaders were forced into exile in Lithuania. Protestors reported rampant human rights abuses, including threats of sexual violence from the police. In November of that year, months after the elections, over two hundred people were detained in Minsk on November 22 alone.
International reactions to Lukashenko’s claimed win were swift but varied. The 2020 Moscow Mechanism report argued there was “overwhelming evidence that the presidential elections of 9 August 2020 [had] been falsified and that massive and systematic human rights violations [had] been committed by the Belarusian security forces in response to peaceful protests and demonstrations.” The EU imposed sanctions on Belarus for the government’s human rights abuses against the protestors. In contrast, Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his long-time ally Lukashenko a congratulatory telegram shortly after the elections. Whilst the West was united in its belief that the 2020 elections were fraudulent, Lukashenko could still rely on old friends for support.
Despite the controversy surrounding the 2020 elections, President Lukashenko was inaugurated for his sixth term on September 23 that year. The following four years leading up to the January 2025 elections saw a continuation of the repression that characterised the government’s immediate response to the election protests. In 2021, Belarusian human rights monitors reported that over thirty thousand people had been detained for engaging in the protests. In 2024, leading up to the first elections in the country since 2020, the regime took further steps to ensure its strength, including engaging in a wave of arrests and raiding the offices of former election observers. Amnesty International has argued that a “suffocating climate of fear” has subsequently been created across Belarus.
On January 26, 2025, four and a half years after the controversial 2020 elections, Lukashenko secured a seventh five-year term in office. Official results declared that he won with 86.82% of the votes cast, even higher than in 2020. Again, the West was united in its response, with a joint statement from Canada, Australia, the EU, New Zealand, and the UK condemning the elections as fraudulent. These countries also expressed further concerns that thousands remained unfairly detained as political prisoners over the course of the election and were subject to systemic and habitual torture. Likewise, Putin once again voiced his support for his close ally Lukashenko, congratulating him for his “resounding victory.”
However, public unrest in Belarus this year has not been seen on a scale in any way comparable to that of 2020. Several rigorous measures have been key to the regime’s efforts to control the result of the elections. First, where in 2020 Tsikhanouskaya sought to pose a legitimate challenge to Lukashenko’s regime, the opposition was successfully kept off the ballot in 2025. Her “Coordination Council,” established in 2020 to facilitate a democratic transition in Belarus, was designated as an extremist group in January 2023, barring its candidates from running for office. The only candidates on the ballot besides Lukashenko were pro-government, including Sergei Syrankov, the leader of the Belarusian Communist Party, whose slogan was “Not instead of, but together with Lukashenko!” Furthermore, whilst the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe was invited to observe the election, they were unable to do so as the Belarusian government only issued the invitation ten days prior to the elections. Combined with the aforementioned tight repression enacted by the government since the 2020 elections, this contributed to an electoral climate in which Lukashenko barely had to engage in any campaigning efforts.
Franak Viačorka, an exiled Belarusian opposition leader, has argued that Belarus has transitioned from an authoritarian to a totalitarian country since 2020. The 2020 “revolution,” as some scholars describe it, has not resulted in a more democratic country, but was instead utilized and manipulated by Lukashenko’s regime as an opportunity to consolidate total power.
