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PROFILE - Belarus's Presidential Non-Election

After what must be one of the most bitterly fought and controversial election campaigns in the experience of the post-communist world, Aleksandr Lukashenko claimed a decisive victory in the presidential election of 9 September 2001. His opponents charged him with a range of anti-democratic acts during his term as president, and offered innumerable examples of irregularities during the campaign itself, including direct infringements of the electoral law. The conduct of the campaign was further denounced in no uncertain terms by the representatives of the European Parliament and the OSCE, two external bodies that had placed international teams of observers across the country to monitor the event. Lukashenko ignored the complaints, claiming an ‘elegant’ victory that gave him a mandate to continue in power for a further five years. In this, he had the support of the Central Electoral Commission, which declared the election to have been entirely free and fair, and of a team of monitors from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), who likewise asserted that all democratic electoral proprieties had been observed. In this way, the authoritarian and idiosyncratic regime of Lukashenko was further consolidated. The outside world was confronted with the manifest failure of a policy of isolation, and had to decide on a new approach that might benefit the cause of democracy, human rights and economic advancement, without giving succour to a leader who was described as ‘the last dictator in Europe’.