© REUTERS/Vasily Fedosenko
People attend a rally following the presidential election in Minsk, Belarus August 11, 2020.
After two nights of protests following the presidential election in Belarus, it's clear that the formal winner, incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko, might have won tactically - but he definitely lost strategically.
The death of at least one protester, the cruelty of police and the extreme violence of the confrontation (the two sides drove vehicles into crowds several times) indicated the extreme polarization of society in Belarus, a post-Soviet republic of 10 million people.
Why can we still say that Alexander Lukashenko won a tactical battle? He will stay in power, at least for the time being, because his opposition is fragmented and does not have a single leader. The formal "second runner" in the election, housewife Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (who got almost 10 percent of the vote, the best official result for an opposition candidate during Lukashenko's 26 years in power), does not have the skill nor the will to press ahead with a recount of the votes, even though very few people believe Lukashenko's official score of over 80 percent of the vote.
Comment: RT further quotes State Duma deputy Konstantin Zatulin from the
pro-Putin United Russia party as saying:
Zatulin maintains that "insane with power" Lukashenko "obviously" didn't receive as many votes as he claims, and says that determining the true number of votes cast is an impossibility.
"The published results are not credible," he explained. "As someone already said, Lukashenko won the election but lost the country, and this is because of his extremely selfish policy, which prioritized preserving his regime of personal power."
Russia-based correspondent Bryan MacDonald is also highly skeptical about the election result:
The opposition leader, who officially got just 10% of the votes, has
fled to Lithuania (though rumor has it she was explicitly sent there by Lukashenko). Far from calling on her countrymen to avenge her electoral defeat, she has
called on them to
"be reasonable and respect the law," so as to avoid "blood and violence. I am asking you not to oppose the police, not to go out on to the squares so as not to risk your lives. Take care of yourselves and your relatives."
The police in Belarus are certainly on edge. In a video widely shared on social media on Tuesday, two members of Belarus' OMON tactical police can be seen
restraining a young man, possibly a protester. The officers manhandle the suspect, and as bystanders complain, one officer tugs on the pin of a grenade.
The detainee is eventually dragged away and bundled into an unmarked van, before being sped off to an uncertain fate. The Belarusian news portal TUT.BY, whose logo appears on the video, is currently unavailable amid reports of massive internet outages. Who cut off the internet is an open question though: Lukashenko claims it was done to the country from without, but that could be more of his mind-games, as Babich suggests above.
From the footage we've seen of the ongoing protests, they appear genuinely spontaneaous: the protesters are
not armed to the teeth with siege and attack equipment, as if prepared months ago for weeks and weeks of rioting, as we have seen in the Hong Kong riots or the US riots. They just turned up to protest because they don't believe the election result and are sick of heavy-handed police brutality.
RFE/RL
reports that Belarus is now under curfew.
Going into this election,
we warned that Belarus president Lukashenko - even if he won another term fairly - was going to face a pressue cooker of dissent...
Political trouble is brewing for Lukashenko, however, so this stance of his on Covid-19 may turn out to be one last 'hurrah' for freedom from him.
We could see this coming not because of signs of foreign interference but because the country's leader so resolutely defied taking up Covid-19 measures, and in fact loudly criticized the whole pandemic as a geopolitical 'scam'.
He is basically correct in his assessment, but he appears to have made a mistake by not 'playing along' like most leaders. Every country on Earth - Belarus included - is made up of large numbers of people who are constitutionally authoritarian and liable to 'lose their shit' if they do not feel that 'Big Brother' is protecting them from external threats. And Covid-19 was the Mother of All External Threats. (It wasn't really, of course, but the authoritarians believed that it was, which is what counts.)
It may not be the only factor in play here, but we suspect that it's the major one. Lukashenko 'failed to protect us', and/or 'cannot be relied on any longer to protect us from future threats, so we have lost faith in him as our leader'...
Comment: RT reports on the continued unrest: For more analysis on the situation in Belarus, see: