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Lawmakers in Belarus on Wednesday set the next presidential election for Jan. 26, a vote almost certain to extend the three-decade rule of authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has suppressed all political dissent.
Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya swiftly denounced the upcoming balloting as a “farce.”
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Lukashenko has already said he would seek what would be his seventh consecutive term, extending back to 1994, and confirmed it Wednesday in remarks to Russian state TV. His last victory came in a 2020 election denounced by the opposition and the West as fraudulent.
That prompted an unprecedented wave of mass protests, and his government responded with a violent crackdown, arresting and beating thousands. Opposition leaders have since been jailed or forced to flee the country.
Tsikhanouskaya, who ran against Lukashenko in 2020, urged Belarusians and the world not to recognize the upcoming election amid the continuing political crackdown.
According to Viasna, Belarus’ oldest and most prominent human rights organization, there are about 1,300 political prisoners in Belarus — including leaders of opposition parties and the group’s founder Ales Bialiatski, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022.
Lukashenko in recent months unexpectedly released 115 political prisoners, after the government said they applied for clemency and repented.
Analysts believe he is using the issue of political prisoners to seek Western recognition of the election result and to soften sanctions against his government.
n other news, President Joe Biden said Thursday he will formally apologize for the U.S. government’s role in separating Native American children from their families and subjecting them to mistreatment in boarding schools. This gesture seeks to recognize the enduring harm these policies caused within Indigenous communities across the nation.
For well over a century, these boarding schools pursued the forced assimilation of Native American youth, often using abusive methods to break cultural ties.
A recent report from the government has cataloged the extensive trauma inflicted, detailing hundreds of cases of abuse and the deaths of more than 950 children within these institutions.
