Alexander Lukashenka

Alexander Lukashenka: Europe's Last Dictator, Explained

In 1995 the new president of Belarus told an interviewer that "not everything connected with that well-known figure Hitler was bad," offering the Reich as a model of presidential authority. Most European politicians would have been finished by lunchtime. Lukashenka was barely started. Three decades later he was still in the Independence Palace, having outlasted every rival, every protest movement, and most of the leaders who once refused to shake his hand.

A Milkmaid's Son from Kopys

He was born on August 30, 1954, in Kopys in the Vitebsk region, though he has since claimed the 31st. He grew up without a father; his mother, Ekaterina Trofimovna, worked unskilled jobs including as a milkmaid, and the origin story of rural hardship has been an instrument of his politics ever since. He graduated from the Mogilev Pedagogical Institute in 1975, served in the Soviet Border Troops until 1977 and in the Soviet Army from 1980 to 1982 as a deputy political officer with a motor rifle division in Minsk, and finished at the Belarusian Agricultural Academy in Horki in 1985.

In 1987 he was made director of the Gorodets state farm in the Shklow district, and promptly introduced leasing contracts — a reformist gesture that would look ironic soon enough. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian SSR in 1990, as the union came apart around him.

The Anti-Corruption Committee

The instrument of his rise was a committee. Made interim chairman of an anti-corruption body in April 1993, he accused seventy senior officials of graft, among them Stanislau Shushkevich, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet and the man who had signed the agreement dissolving the USSR. Shushkevich resigned. Lukashenka had discovered the method he would use for thirty years: not policy, but the public destruction of individuals.

In 1994 he won the first competitive presidential election in Belarusian history, taking 45.1 percent in the first round and 80.1 in the second. He was inaugurated on July 20, 1994. He remains the country's first and only president.

Rewriting the Constitution Twice

The dismantling took two years. A 1995 referendum gave Russian equal official status, approved economic integration with Moscow, restored Soviet-style state symbols and — the operative clause — handed the president power to dissolve parliament, on a reported 81.4 percent. The OSCE's parliamentary assembly found the vote fell short of free and fair standards. A second referendum in 1996 expanded presidential power further and dismissed the Supreme Council outright; the United States and European Union declined to recognise it. In 2004 a third referendum abolished presidential term limits on a claimed 79.42 percent, and the ceiling was gone.

The elections that followed were formalities. He took 75.65 percent in 2001, 86 in 2006, 79.65 in 2010, a fifth term in 2015, and 88 percent in 2025, when he was inaugurated for a seventh term in March. The 2006 result produced the single most revealing remark of his career: he had, he said, rigged the results against himself, since he had actually won 93.5 percent.

Disappearances

In 1999, after a broadcast in which Lukashenka instructed his security chiefs to deal with "opposition scum," the opposition figures Yury Zacharanka and Viktar Hanchar vanished. The journalist Dzmitry Zavadski disappeared in 2000. A Deutsche Welle documentary in 2019 confirmed that a special unit had murdered them.

August 2020

The ninth of August 2020 broke the arrangement. Lukashenka claimed 80.1 percent; the civic monitoring initiative Golos concluded that the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya had taken an absolute majority of at least 52 percent. The country rose, including the previously apolitical, and the response was industrial. The UN human rights office documented 450 cases of torture, including sexual violence. Lukashenka first said detainees had faked their bruises, then conceded to the BBC that "people were beaten in the Okrestina" detention centre.

The repression did not subside; it institutionalised. Belarus now holds well over 600 political prisoners, against roughly thirty after the 2010 election — more than Russia. The journalist Stsyapan Latypau drew eight and a half years for trying to stop police painting over an opposition mural. Tut.by, the main independent outlet, was blocked in 2021 with twenty-six journalists imprisoned; Reporters Without Borders calls Belarus the most dangerous country in Europe for media personnel. The EU, UK and US stopped recognising him as the legitimate president.

The Hostage and the Border

Two improvisations followed. In May 2021 he personally ordered a Ryanair flight from Athens to Vilnius forced down at Minsk on a false bomb report, escorted by a MiG-29, in order to arrest the journalist Roman Protasevich. Then, as sanctions accumulated, he advertised Belarus as a route into the European Union, manufacturing a migrant crisis on the Polish and Lithuanian borders. Four EU sanctions rounds hit 166 individuals and fifteen entities, costing an estimated 2.9 percent of GDP, or $1.68 billion.

Vassal to Moscow

The bill came due in Russian currency. Having spent years resisting absorption — in 2020 he publicly accused Putin of wanting to make Belarus part of Russia — he let Russian forces stage the 2022 invasion of Ukraine from Belarusian soil. Moscow released about $1 billion of a $1.5 billion loan; analysts began describing the country's drift as "Donbasization," a quasi-state under a Russian umbrella. He mediated the Wagner mutiny in June 2023, claiming he had stopped Putin destroying the group, and by 2025 Russian tactical nuclear weapons were deployed on his territory. In August 2025 he announced he would not seek another term.

Why Alexander Is Called a Genius

Nobody credible calls Lukashenka a genius in the honorific sense, and the word only earns its place here if it is stripped down to one narrow, ugly competence: political survival. At that he has no living European equal. Thirty-two years in power, six manufactured re-elections, and not one moment when a successor looked plausible.

The skill is real and worth naming precisely. He reads rural and working-class resentment better than his opponents ever did, and he speaks its language rather than the intelligentsia's. He grasped early that anti-corruption is the perfect weapon because it destroys people individually while flattering the public. He is willing to apply force sooner and harder than democratic instinct expects, and he understands that a referendum is more useful than a coup because it launders the same result. That is tactical intelligence of a high order.

It is also the whole of it, and the counter-case is overwhelming. He appears to have lost the 2020 election outright and stayed only by torturing his way through the aftermath. Every improvisation since — the Ryanair hijacking, the engineered migrant crisis — has backfired into deeper sanctions and deeper dependence on Moscow. The economy he defends never escaped subsidised Russian oil. A man who spent twenty-five years resisting absorption by Russia ended by hosting its nuclear weapons and its invasion route. Survival is not the same as strategy, and cunning is not the same as thought.

Legacy

The system carries his name: Lukashism, an authoritarianism assembled from personality cult and Soviet nostalgia, in which presidential decrees outrank legislation and parliament has been reliably his since 2004. John Sweeney described the bargain as "a mutant version of the Soviet Union's deal with its people: they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." He plays ice hockey annually, campaigned once to revive potato production, and has said it is better to be a dictator than gay. What he leaves is a country with more political prisoners than Russia, an exiled opposition, and a sovereignty he spent his career defending and his last years signing away.

Achievements

• Educated at Mahilyow State A. Kulyashow University, Faculty of Economy of the Belarusian State Agricultural Academy and Alexandrya Secondary School
• Worked as politician, director and political commissar