Western observers yesterday slammed the weekend election in Belarus as neither competitive nor free, after factions loyal to authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko won every seat in Parliament.
The OSCE-led observers said in a damning indictment of Sunday’s poll that there were serious concerns over the count, which the opposition claimed produced an official turnout almost twice that of the real figure.
Voter participation was a massive 74.2 per cent, the central election commission said, while not a single member of the opposition won one of the 110 parliamentary seats up for grabs.
“This election was not competitive from the start,” said Matteo Mecacci, special coordinator of the observer mission of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
“A free election depends on people being free to speak, organise and run for office, and we didn’t see that in this campaign.”
Antonio Milososki, head of the long-term observation mission, said there were “serious concerns” over the lack of proper counting procedures or ways for the results to be verified.
“The continued lack of properly delineated counting procedures meant that an honest count could not be guaranteed,” the observers added in a statement.
Even before the OSCE report was released, the head of the Belarus election commission Lidya Yermoshina criticised international observers for seeing their role “not as bringing us help but as creating conflictual situations”.
Riot police meanwhile detained around 20 young activists who observed the process as part of a project on behalf of rights groups based outside the country, the Vyasna (Spring) rights group said.
Only four candidates who were not part of the main pro-government faction won seats in Parliament. Three of those new lawmakers belong to the largely pro-government Communist Party while one is a member of the marginally opposition Agrarian Party. All four had pledged allegiance to Lukashenko’s policies.
In a quirk typical of the regime of Lukashenko, who has ruled the ex-Soviet state for 18 years and was once dubbed Europe’s last dictator by Washington, there is no ruling party in Belarus. Opposition parties – several of whom called for a boycott of the polls in a show of civil disobedience – said the turnout figure was absurd but were in no position to organise mass protests.
“This was the worst of the worst election campaigns in Belarus,” the opposition United Civil Party leader Anatoly Lebedko said.
Lukashenko appeared oblivious to the controversy, declaring that “we tried to conduct elections democratically so that nobody would smell a rat,” according to the presidential website.
“We improve a little bit from election to election and try to make all these processes automatic,” he told a Russian election observer, whose mission gave the polls a clean bill of health.