The end of the dictatorship or the beginning of another? Scenarios that open up when Lukashenko is gone

The leaders gather under an unexpected spring sun to walk to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, about 300 meters away from your location. However, something is not right. Lukashenko disappears from the scene to reappear after a few seconds sitting in an electric car that transports them to the place where the rest of the politicians have walked. Hours later, he is the only guest who does not attend lunch that the head of the Kremlin offers his guests. And that’s when the rumors about the true state of health of the Belarusian leader begin, 68 years old.

Days later, when Lukashenko he missed After the Flag Day ceremony in Minsk for the first time in 29 years, suspicions about a possible disease began to gather strength. That, added to the information that ensured that he was hospitalized and an inexplicable government silence added fuel to the fire.

A week later, he reappeared in a hoarse video, dressed as a military man and visibly in poor condition, to deny the rumors. He traveled back to Moscow to meet his Eurasian associates. He joked that “was not going to die” and? “I was going to keep bothering for a long time”. He has been seen three or four times since then, even accompanied by Putin over a pompous breakfast, but none of these efforts to show that he is in top form have succeeded in quelling the question of what will happen when the man who has ruled Belarus with an iron fist for three decades has completely disappeared from the scene. Or rather: who will replace the “last dictator of Europe”?

Elections fair?

In principle, the Belarusian Constitution points out that, in the event that the position of president becomes vacant due to death or incapacity, she will be the president of the upper house of the National Assembly, Natalia Kochanova, who occupies the position temporarily. Subsequently, general elections will have to be called between the next 30 and 70 days. So, from a legal point of view, the future head of state of the country should be elected “directly by the people of the Republic of Belarus on the basis of universal, free, equal suffrage and direct by secret ballot”.

However, the original Magna Carta also contemplates that the same person can only be president for two terms and Lukashenko has already been six thanks to a reform that allows him to be reelected indefinitely. In the same way, the text also speaks of democracy, although in 2020 Lukashenko not only refused to recognize the electoral results that ensured victory for the opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskayasbut rather repressed with a heavy hand the protests that broke out against him and imprisoned to hundreds of dissidents.

So, in this sense, everything points to the fact that in practice, the succession to Lukashenko will not follow the legal course that it should. There are experts who predict that the future heir will be someone close the current president, someone from his inner circle. The problem is that in all his years in power, Lukashenko has been dismissing one after another ministers, security chiefs, ambassadors. Ultimately, anyone likely to compete.

“Lukashenko has imported Putin’s model”, summarizes Mira Milosevich-Juaristi, Principal Investigator at the Elcano Royal Institute, expert in Russia, Eurasia and the Balkans. she refers to the maneuvers that the Russian president initiated in 2011 to suppress -with legislative protection- any opposition to the regime and that have their derivatives outside the law, such as assassination attempts or the mysterious defenestrations of oligarchs Close to the Kremlin. “Both have remained in power by repressing any type of opposition, however minimal,” the academic explained to El ESPAÑOL. A strategy that, however, has also made it difficult to clearly name an heir to the throne.

For the opposition, this is an advantage, since they hope that when Lukashenko is no longer around, he will long-awaited democratic opening which in 2020 brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets. The problem is that since that year, half have been in exile (like Tijanóvskayas, who fled to Lithuania) and the other half, in prison. even so, the hope of opposition leaders seems to remain intact. They believe that the Belarusians will rise up again to prevent the country from passing from the hands of one dictator to another.

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As an example, Valeri Tsepkaloa former Belarusian official who tried to run in the last presidential elections in Belarus before being banned and who, after assuring -without evidence- a few days ago that Lukashenko was ill again, asked the international community for help to overthrow the regime.

“Regardless of whether you recover or not, doctors warn about the possibility of relapses. As representatives of the Belarusian Democratic Forum of the Republic of Belarus, we urge the leaders Westerners to convene a strategic session in the coming days to discuss the elections and other measures to be taken to ensure the transition period,” he wrote on Twitter from Moscow, where he traveled to avoid arrest a few years ago.

An opposition in exile

“I hope the opposition is prepared, but the national apparatus is well tied up: the elites are corrupt and have certain privileges that they are not going to give up, so they are neither going to carry out a coup nor are they going to allow others to do so” , argues Milósevich-Juaristi. Added to that is another hurdle: the influence that Russia has been harvesting in the neighboring country for years.

“Putin’s greatest success has been to attack Belarus without having to intervene like in Ukraine: he has gradually absorbed the country, without territorially annexing it, but imposing the will of the Kremlin and signing agreements that, even if there was a revolution, will be very difficult to undo”, details the researcher from the Elcano Royal Institute. These pacts permeate the entire Belarusian system and range from the banking model to the army. They include, among other things, military associations and agreements such as the one that Putin and Lukashenko reached in May and that allows the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons Russian in Belarus.

“Belarusian society is not pro-Western; it feels culturally, linguistically and historically closer to Russia”

Mira Milosevich-JuaristiPrincipal Investigator at the Elcano Royal Institute

Added to this political interdependence is the closeness between societies. “There is a reality that we do not want to see: that despite being against Putin or Lukashenko, Belarusian society not pro-Western or pro-Europeanbut culturally, linguistically and historically it feels closer to Russia”, explains Milósevich-Juaristi. This is also suggested by a Carnegie Europe survey on the polarization in Belarusian society held in December 2020, when the protests on the streets of Minsk were still alive.

So, just under 42% of citizens he agreed with the statement that democracy was the best form of government. Against this, 13% said authoritarianism is sometimes preferable to democracy, while around 9% said they didn’t care about the type of government. “They have no democratic experience and any attempt is suffocated”, indicates the researcher.

Hence, to the fear of possible repression by the national authorities is added the fear of a possible retaliation from the neighboring country or direct intervention to put someone like Lukashenko in power: a vassal of the Kremlin. The fear could also have increased since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “Many see Ukraine as the price to pay for moving away from Russia,” concludes Milósevich-Juaristi, who views the outbreak of a new revolution in Belarus with skepticism.