Minsk, Jan 26 (AP) The smiling face of President Alexander Lukashenko gazed out from campaign posters across Belarus on Sunday as the country held an orchestrated election virtually guaranteed to give the 70-year-old autocrat yet another term on top of his three decades in power.

“Needed!” the posters proclaim beneath a photo of Lukashenko, his hands clasped together. The phrase is what groups of voters responded in campaign videos after supposedly being asked if they wanted him to serve again.

But his opponents, many of whom are imprisoned or exiled abroad by his unrelenting crackdown on dissent and free speech, would disagree. They call the election a sham — much like the last one in 2020 that triggered months of protests that were unprecedented in the history of the country of 9 million people.

The crackdown saw more than 65,000 arrests, with thousands beaten, bringing condemnation and sanctions from the West.

His iron-fisted rule since 1994 — Lukashenko took office two years after the demise of the Soviet Union — earned him the nickname of “Europe's Last Dictator”, relying on subsidies and political support from close ally Russia.

He let Moscow use his territory to invade Ukraine in 2022, and even hosts some of Russia's tactical nuclear weapons, but he still campaigned with the slogan “Peace and security”, arguing he has saved Belarus from being drawn into war.

“It's better to have a dictatorship like in Belarus than a democracy like Ukraine,” Lukashenko said in his characteristic bluntness.

Fearing a repeat of election unrest His reliance on support from Russian President Vladimir Putin — himself in office for a quarter-century — helped him survive the 2020 protests.

Observers believe Lukashenko feared a repeat of those mass demonstrations amid economic troubles and the fighting in Ukraine, and so scheduled the vote in January, when few would want to fill the streets again, rather than in August. He faces only token opposition.

“The trauma of the 2020 protests was so deep that Lukashenko this time decided not to take risks and opted for the most reliable option when balloting looks more like a special operation to retain power than an election,” Belarusian political analyst Valery Karbalevich said.

Lukashenko repeatedly declared that he wasn't clinging to power and would “quietly and calmly hand it over to the new generation”.

His 20-year-old son, Nikolai, travelled the country, giving interviews, signing autographs and playing piano at campaign events. His father hasn't mentioned his own health, even though he was seen having difficulty walking and occasionally spoke in a hoarse voice.

“The successor issue only becomes relevant when a leader prepares to step down. But Lukashenko isn't going to leave,” Karbalevich said.

Top political opponents imprisoned or exiled Leading opponents have fled abroad or were thrown in prison. The country holds nearly 1,300 political prisoners, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, founder of the Viasna Human Rights Centre.

Since July, Lukashenko has pardoned more than 250 people. At the same time, authorities have sought to uproot dissent by arresting hundreds more in raids targeting relatives and friends of political prisoners.

Authorities detained 188 people last month alone, Viasna said. Activists and those who donated money to opposition groups have been summoned by police and forced to sign papers saying they were warned against participating in unsanctioned demonstrations, rights advocates said.

Lukashenko's four challengers on the ballot are all loyal to him.

“I'm entering the race not against, but together with Lukashenko, and I'm ready to serve as his vanguard,” said Communist Party candidate Sergei Syrankov, who favours criminalising LGBTQ+ activities and rebuilding monuments to Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Candidate Alexander Khizhnyak, head of the Republican Party of Labour and Justice, led a voting precinct in Minsk in 2020 and vowed to prevent a “repeat of disturbances”.

Oleg Gaidukevich, head of the Liberal Democratic Party, supported Lukashenko in 2020 and urged fellow candidates to “make Lukashenko's enemies nauseous”.

The fourth challenger, Hanna Kanapatskaya, managed 1.7 per cent of the vote in 2020 and says she's the “only democratic alternative to Lukashenko”, promising to lobby for freeing political prisoners but warning supporters against “excessive initiative”.

Opposition leader calls election a senseless farce Opposition leader-in-exile Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who fled Belarus under government pressure after challenging the president in 2020, told The Associated Press that Sunday's election was “a senseless farce, a Lukashenko ritual”.

Voters should cross off everyone on the ballot, she said, and world leaders shouldn't recognise the result from a country “where all independent media and opposition parties have been destroyed and prisons are filled by political prisoners".

“The repressions have become even more brutal as this vote without choice has approached, but Lukashenko acts as though hundreds of thousands of people are still standing outside his palace,” she said.

The European Parliament urged the European Union to reject the election outcome. EU's top diplomat Kaja Kallas called the vote “a blatant affront to democracy”.

Shortly after voting in Minsk on Sunday, Lukashenko told journalists that he did not seek recognition or approval from the EU.

“The main thing for me is that Belarusians recognize these elections and that they end peacefully, as they began,” he said.

Media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders filed a complaint against Lukashenko with the International Criminal Court over his crackdown on free speech that saw 397 journalists arrested since 2020. It said that 43 are in prison.

Fears of vote-rigging According to the Central Election Commission, there are 6.8 million eligible voters. However, about 500,000 people have left Belarus and aren't able to vote.

At home, early voting that began on Tuesday has created fertile ground for irregularities with ballot boxes unguarded until election day, the opposition said. A record 41.81 per cent of voters cast ballots in five days of early voting.

Meanwhile, Viasna activists reported internet issues across the country, and alleged Lukashenko's government was blocking access to VPN services commonly used to evade censorship.

Polling stations have removed the curtains covering ballot boxes, and voters are forbidden from photographing their ballots — a response to the opposition's call in 2020 for voters to take pictures to make it more difficult for authorities to rig the vote.

Police conducted large-scale drills before the election. An Interior Ministry video showed helmeted riot police beating their shields with truncheons as a way to prepare for protest dispersals. Another featured an officer arresting a man posing as a voter, twisting his arm next to a ballot box.

Belarus initially refused to allow observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitored previous elections. It changed course this month and invited the OSCE — when it was already too late to organise a monitoring mission.

Increasing dependence on Russia Lukashenko's support for the war in Ukraine has led to the rupture of Belarus' ties with the US and the EU, ending his gamesmanship of using the West to try to win more subsidies from the Kremlin.

“Until 2020, Lukashenko could maneuver and play Russia against the West, but now when Belarus' status is close to that of Russia's satellite, this North Korea-style election ties the Belarusian leader to the Kremlin even stronger, shortening the leash,” said Artyom Shraybman, a Belarus expert with the Carnegie Russia and Eurasia Centre.

After the election, Lukashenko could try to ease his total dependence on Russia by again seeking to reach out to the West, he predicted.

“Lukashenko's interim goal is to use the election to confirm his legitimacy and try to overcome his isolation in order to at least start a conversation with the West about easing sanctions,” Shraybman said. (AP) PY PY