Alexander Lukashenko, fake President of Belarus

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Alexander Lukashenko, fake President of Belarus

Election cheat Lukashenko keeps power.

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SOPA IMAGES/ALAMY

Lukashenko is President of Belarus and people see him as Europe’s last dictator.

Lukashenko clearly enjoys power and doesn’t waste it. He uses it to pay for a rich lifestyle that most Belarusians could not really imagine. The opposition video Lukashenko Goldmine, has gone viral on the internet. It tells us that his rich Independence Palace in Minsk cost $250 million and he has 17 other houses around the country. He also has a lot of planes and cars and we are looking at another terrible example of a president using power to steal from the country.

Lukashenko has practised using power for a long time. He was a Soviet apparatchik, a member of the Communist party, like his friend Vladimir Putin. He took power in 1994 after the end of the Soviet Union. Like Putin, he uses arrests, disappearances, policing against protesters, and shutting down media. His way of working is to is to organise fake ‘elections’, which he ‘wins’ usually by about 80 per cent. Sadly for him, Belarusians are beginning to protest against this.

Things changed when he did it again with fake elections in August 2020, and said he won again for the sixth time with the usual but unlikely 80 per cent of the vote. Many angry Belarusians took to the streets against the teargas and rubber bullets in the biggest protests than ever before in Minsk. The big numbers supported the opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, and that she was the winner with about 60 per cent of the vote. She was forced to leave Belarus and she now lives in Warsaw.

Today, months after the protests, hundreds are still in prison and thousands of activists left the country. Journalists are a favourite target; media, like the independent web portal Tut.by (with 400,000 followers), were shut. And now there are threats to build a big concentration camp for protesters.

Russia and the Russian language are two of the political problems in Belarus. The country is divided between those who speak Russian and those who speak Belarusian as their main language. Many nationalists prefer Belarusian.

There are different opinions in the opposition in Belarus. Some people support Europe and the West, which Moscow doesn’t like. It is likely that Putin was embarrassed by the public protests against his friend, Lukashenko, but it is also likely that he will continue to support him. Now the opposition has the job of adding to its young activist supporters the industrial workers and unions that are the heart of the Belarusian Soviet-style economy. The very little success of the strikes against Lukashenko shows how necessary this is.

Under pressure at home and from abroad, Lukashenko promised in November 2020 to resign after Belarusians approved a new constitution. These promises are now no more as the police state showed it is not interested in justice. The promised constitution now seems to be a way of keeping Lukashenko and his supporters in power.

A Belarusian joke: A man is going quietly home from work. He is not drunk. Suddenly a police car stops, riot police jump out, and start pushing him into the car. They hit him with their batons. The man shouts, ‘Let me go, I voted for Lukashenko!’ They reply, ‘Don’t lie, no-one voted for Lukashenko!’

NOW READ THE ORIGINAL:

https://newint.org/features/2021/06/08/hall-infamy-alexander-lukashenko

(This article is in easier English so it is possible that we changed the words, the text structure, and the quotes.)