Unlike his colleagues, Lukashenka refused even to fake democracy. Lukashenka never waits for threats to emerge before dealing with them. His government cracks down on political parties and players that are still weak. It removes from the political arena even those opposition leaders who are unlikely to pose a serious challenge in the next election. It attacks the independent press even if it reaches only small segments of the population. It destroys civil society organizations even when these are concentrated in a relatively circumscribed urban subculture. Perhaps most important, it strives to achieve huge electoral victories by devious means even when the incumbent would be likely to win in a fair contest. The consequence is an atmosphere of hopelessness imposed on opponents and an entire society that learns to accept Lukashenka as leader-for-life.

When Lukashenka pushed through a referendum in 1996 that endowed the president with absolute power, he was genuinely popular with the electorate and did not need such an extreme accumulation of power to win the next election. In 2001, when he ran for re-election for the first time, Lukashenka already had a lesson of an “electoral revolution” from the downfall of his longtime friend Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. He took heed by making sure that the system denied any significant participation by the opposition in the electoral process. Official media were mobilized to discredit the events that overtook Serbia, portraying the actions of the opposition as a ploy to manipulate the elections with improper voting conduct. No single representative of the opposition was accepted as a member of an election commission in the entire country. The authorities banned exit polls, branding them “charlatanism” and an unscientific method of verifying election results. More than 2,000 election observers were denied accreditation just days before voting took place.

In preparation for the referendum that lifted term limits on the presidency and allowed Lukashenka to rule indefinitely, Belarusian authorities virtually destroyed the independent press and civil society, closing down dozens of NGOs, suspending a vast array of media, and even shutting down the leading private university, whose students and teachers resisted official indoctrination. Sources of alternative opinion were neutralized and replaced with official propaganda. An intensification of political control established prohibitively high costs for opposing the government, ranging from high fines to suspension from the state-run workplace.

As a result of this careful preparation and intimidation, the referendum of October 17, 2004, met little organized resistance. The official results gave Lukashenka nearly 80 percent of the vote. Ample evidence supported allegations of extensive vote-rigging, as independent observers and opposition activists found stuffed ballot boxes and pre-marked ballot papers. Alternative vote counts suggested that perhaps as few as 49 percent of Belarusians voted in favor of lifting the term limits. Nonetheless, the atmosphere of fear created by the authorities reduced the number of street protesters to a few thousand on the streets of the capital. The polling agency that conducted the alternative exit poll in quasi-underground conditions was closed down within a few months of the referendum.

When Ukraine’s Orange Revolution unfolded only five weeks after the constitutional referendum in Belarus, Lukashenka again showed no complacency even though there was no real threat of regime change in Belarus. Lukashenka immediately warned his inner circle that “modern political techniques and a weakly managed country are pregnant with serious consequences” and vowed resistance against “acts of banditry” (his own description of electoral revolutions) in Belarus. As a result, the regime further shrunk the legal space in which opposition parties, civil society, and the independent press in Belarus could operate, removed from the political scene leading opposition groups active in organizing street protests, and drilled security forces specifically to disperse street protests that could be organized as they were in Kiev or Tbilisi. The security forces received an implicit order from Lukashenka to act against the opposition, and amended legislation provided the legal basis for continued repression by permitting the president to decide when firearms could be used during peacetime, effectively allowing him to approve armed crackdowns on protests.

Furthermore, the Belarusian parliament approved in December 2005 new amendments to the Criminal Code, imposing lengthy prison services for participating in unregistered non-governmental organizations, teaching techniques of civil disobedience, and “defaming Belarus in the international arena.” These new punishments, intended to scare the opposition before the presidential elections of March 2006, seem redundant since Lukashenka is poised to easily win the ballot even according to the data of independent polls. But the regime does not even take chances with research. The largest independent think tank and polling institution was illegalized in April 2005: its findings routinely gave Lukashenka the advantage, but to a lesser degree than official propaganda.

Lukashenka’s repressive tactics are not atypical for an authoritarian regime. What is remarkable is how, in spite of the scale, intensity, and visibility of the repression, he manages to retain the image of a duly elected leader. Belarusian elections violate any serious democratic criteria and cannot fool the opposition or the international community; but so far they have worked only to enhance the dictator’s domestic legitimacy. His pre-emptive attacks have prevented the rise of a credible and visible democratic alternative, and his tight hold on the media has successfully kept most of the public in the dark—either unaware of the massive abuses or convinced that the regime would win a clean election anyway. Despite some sizeable opposition protests over the last decade, postelection nights have always been quiet and subdued.

Can Belarus Change?

It would be wrong to presume that there is no demand for change in Belarus. However, the Lukashenka government is fully capable of foreclosing any changes through pre-emptive strikes aimed at vital political and social actors who might act as prime movers of reform in the country. The domination of the state over society through political repression and economic control provides the government with an opportunity to re-engineer the social landscape, destroying the remaining bonds of self-organization, creating stronger links of dependence upon the state, and pushing the public away from any form of independent activity. The state has managed to convince even committed opponents of the status quo that no change is possible in Belarus. The failure of previous attempts to challenge authority have made hopelessness a routine. Every new political event is awaited as another show of force by the presidency.