Belarus' snap election — and what it means for Lukashenko's prospects

As predicted by experts, including these authors in EUobserver, Belarus will hold a snap presidential election. The date of the vote is 26 January, 2025.

Unsurprisingly, Aleksandr Lukashenko — without delay — announced his determination to run for yet another term in office, his seventh in a row.

Trying to understand the rush with the elections, most analysts agree that the regime’s international situation plays a big role in the decision. Lukashenko must have realised that continuing isolation by the West and excessive dependence on Moscow have become a threat to his power inside Belarus.

If the Kremlin’s benign approach to the Minsk regime toughens, there will be no one to help him resist the pressure.

Early elections are arguably supposed to re-establish a modicum of domestic legitimacy and on that basis offer a new arrangement to the West.  

Lukashenko has done similar things before.

It would have sufficed to promise the West some domestic liberalisation, and normalisation of relations would commence. The real motivation of the West was always geopolitical: enlarging Minsk’s space of manouevre vis-à-vis Moscow. 

The biggest success of Lukashenko was reached in 2014-2015, after the annexation of Crimea by Russia and the start of the armed conflict in Donbas. The West agreed to pretend that Lukashenko would play a role of a mediator in the conflict, even though it was self-evident that Minsk was a location only, not an actor.

Minsk 'middle-man'?

As a result, Lukashenko posed simultaneously as Russia’s closest ally and a security partner of the West — with financial perks following.

However, the  political crisis that broke out in Belarus in August 2020 after the rigged presidential elections and the incident with the Ryanair flight 4978 in May 2021 dealt heavy blows to Belarus-West relations.

Hijacking an intra-EU flight to arrest a political opponent was too much for Brussels to tolerate.

The EU finally imposed on Belarus serious economic sanctions, which it had been reluctant to do in response to massive repressions against the opposition-minded Belarusians. Staging a migration crisis, lasting until now, on the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, only further deteriorated Lukashenko’s relations with the West.

Russia’s war against Ukraine must have seemed to Lukashenko to be a moment of opportunity. The role of an enabler of the Russian invasion and, legally speaking, a co-aggressor made him more important for Kremlin than ever.

Plausibly, Lukashenko would have had nothing against seeing Belarusian troops taking part in festivities on the occasion of Russia’s expected easy 'victory'.

Yet, at the same time he was also ready to again offer his services as a mediator. Russian-Ukrainian peace talks did take place in the Homel region in March 2022.

The fact that Ukraine kept its ambassador in Minsk until mid-2023 indicates that Belarus may have mattered in this respect.

But for as long as the West ignored Lukashenko’s effort at 'peace', he had to change his image-making strategy. Lukashenko started emphasising his “centrality” for Putin’s decisions. Statements such as “we decided” or “I informed Putin” became routine. 

Two issues stood out in Lukashenko’s gamble.

One was the announced return of Russian nuclear weapons to Belarus. Although the fact has not been confirmed by Western sources, Lukashenko kept claiming, despite Moscow’s denial, that the use of these weapons would require “two keys”, one of which is in his pocket. The West is a target audience for this claim, which is both blackmail and an invitation to bargain. But since its credibility is low, thus far it has had no effect on the Western stance towards Minsk.

Another case was Lukashenko’s self-acclaimed role during Evgeniy Prigozhin’s mutiny in June 2023.

Lukashenko publicly boasted that only thanks to his “security guarantees” and his readiness to host the Wagner troops in Belarus after the mutiny Russia had avoided warfare inside the country.

Yet, the death of Prigozhin in a suspicious plane crash in August 2023 showed how 'reliable' are Lukashenko’s 'guarantees'.

North Korean and Iran new best friends of Putin

By mid-2024 it became clear that since Moscow had avoided international ostracism thanks to its ties with Global South and received military assistance, in particular, from Iran and North Korea, the Kremlin had less reasons to provide Minsk with any 'priority treatment'.

In turn, the West eventually took a position that geopolitically Belarus is just an extension of Russia which hardly deserves a separate, softened approach. 

The principled position of the West as regards Belarus has started to bear fruit.

If Lukashenko wants to turn the page in this relationship, he should not be sending coded and controversial signals about his willingness to “restart the dialogue”.

Instead, he should release all political prisoners without any preliminary conditions. Another rigged election held in the atmosphere of fear and repression will definitely not change anything in the desperate international situation of Lukashenko’s regime.