Belarus is a fully-fledged dictatorship after a rigged vote allowing an autocratic president to keep power, and is a ”testing ground” for similar plans in Russia, Belarus opposition leaders said in Moscow on Tuesday.
”We now have a dictatorship,” Alexander Voitovich, a respected Belarussian academic who served from 1997 to 2000 as chairperson of the Belarus National Academy of Sciences, told a news conference.
Voitovich and six other leading Belarus opposition figures said voting on Sunday on a plan pushed by Belarus’s hardline President Alexander Lukashenko to scrap a constitutional limit of two terms for presidents was deeply dishonest.
A referendum on that change was ”totally illegitimate” and a violation of the rights of every Belarus citizen, and there were ”egregious violations” in every step of legislative elections held simultaneously, Voitovich said.
Gennady Buravkin, a noted Belarus poet and former ambassador, agreed and warned that Russian support for Lukashenko and acceptance of the official voting results suggest that the same scenario is in store for Russia.
”Belarus is a testing ground for Russia,” Buravkin said. ”My friends, what is happening today in Belarus … is your future.”
Election officials in Minsk said on Monday that more than 77% of eligible voters in the impoverished former Soviet republic had approved Lukashenko’s proposal to scrap presidential term limits in the Constitution.
Independent data based on comprehensive exit polls, including those published by the Gallup Organisation, put support for Lukashenko’s referendum at 48,4% of eligible voters.
Western governments and organisations slammed the referendum and legislative elections, calling them ”seriously flawed” and saying they ”fell far short” of democratic norms. — Sapa-AFP