Pro-Government Candidates Sweep Belarusian Elections Amid Fraud Allegations

Belarusian elections were fraught with allegations of ballot box stuffing and a lack of transparency. (AP News)

Independent observers have condemned Belarus’s November 17 parliamentary election, citing a lack of transparency and widespread voter fraud. Not a single opposition candidate won a seat, further cementing current President Alexander Lukashenko and his supporters’ longtime grip on power in the nation.

All 110 seats in Belarus’s National Assembly were contested by a total of 558 candidates, including several opposition activists and party leaders. However, another 145 prospective candidates were prevented from running based on alleged noncompliance with election law, including many prominent opposition figures. Among them were Alena Anisim and Hanna Kanapatskaya, the only two opposition members currently serving in parliament. Election authorities found that some of the signatures they had collected in order to gain a spot on the ballot were invalid, a decision that Anisim called a “technical inaccuracy.” 

Restrictions on openly criticising the government hampered candidates’ ability to freely campaign. Local media coverage of elections issues was limited, and during the campaign process, several candidates were deregistered or even detained by authorities.

Though the government claims a 77.2-percent turnout, this number is contested by independent observers. More than one-third of the registered votes were cast early, when ballot boxes were left largely unguarded and the presence of independent observers was significantly sparser than on election day. Observers have estimated that half of the early votes cast were fraudulent, leading to artificially high turnout figures. This is supported by a video showing a woman attempting to cast several ballots at a polling station in the city of Brest during early voting. The need to inflate voter turnout, beyond lending false credibility to election outcomes, is due in part to a national law requiring at least 50-percent turnout in order for results to be considered valid. 

On election day, outside observers were granted limited access to the proceedings. Many were relegated to vantage points far away from where the vote-counting took place, and one observer was expelled from a polling station after he requested a recount. The OSCE summarized the offenses in a report, claiming, “the integrity of the election process was not adequately safeguarded.” Nikolai Statkevich, an opposition candidate, suggested that authorities had decided the result of the elections well in advance, adding that “a change of power in Belarus is not possible through elections.”

Government officials have defended the election process in the wake of the allegations. Belarus’s foreign minister said, “We hold elections for our country and people, not to please external forces,” while Lukashenko said on the subject of mishandled elections, “I’m not in the habit of worrying about this matter.” Lukashenko went on to speak out in support of the woman captured on video stuffing a ballot box, pointing out to her critics that she is a woman with a husband and family, and asking, “How does she feel?”

The situation is nothing new for Belaurus, where not one election has been considered “free and fair” in more than 20 years. The National Assembly has been described as a “rubber stamp” for Lukashenko, who has ruled the nation for 25 years by suppressing dissent.  

However, recent developments indicate that some Belorusians are frustrated with the entrenched leadership of their country. A few weeks prior to the election, more than one thousand citizens turned out in the Belarusian capital to protest Lukashenko, spurred by a popular pro-democracy blogger. 

Though opposition candidates themselves recognize the unlikelihood of their winning, by running they hope to “remind the public that [the opposition] exists, to train its members for the future, and register voter fraud, thereby undermining the regime's legitimacy in the eyes of its supporters and the West," according to journalist Artyom Shraibman. Ihar Barysau, chair of the opposition party Hramada, supported this assessment, stating that he ran to bring light to election law violations.

Political analyst Alexander Klaskovsky called the vote a “dress rehearsal” for the upcoming presidential election in which Lukashenko is expected to maintain his iron grip on the nation.