The 2020 Belarusian protests (also known by various other names) are a series of ongoing political demonstrations and protests against the Belarusian government and President Alexander Lukashenko. The largest anti-government protests in the history of Belarus, the demonstrations began in the lead-up to and during the 2020 presidential election, in which Lukashenko sought his sixth term in office. In response to the demonstrations, a number of relatively small pro-government rallies were held.
Initially moderate, the protests intensified nationwide after official election results were announced on the night of 10 August, in which Lukashenko was declared the winner. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the main opponent of Lukashenko, rejected these results as falsified and claimed instead to have received 60–70% of the votes. On 14 August, she announced the creation of the Coordination Council, with membership applications open to all Belarusians who also agreed that the official election had been falsified. On 12 October, the Coordination Council issued Lukashenko an ultimatum to cease all repression, free detainees and step down from the presidency by 25 October. After Lukashenko failed to comply, nationwide strikes began on 26 October.
On 23 September, Belarusian state media announced that Lukashenko had been inaugurated for another five-year term in a brief ceremony which was held privately. The following day, the EU published a statement which rejected the legitimacy of the election, called for new elections, and condemning the repression and violence against the protesters. On 2 October, the EU introduced sanctions against 40 Belarusian officials accused of political repression and vote rigging. Lukashenko himself was not included on the list. The Belarusian government responded by imposing symmetrical sanctions against an undisclosed list of EU officials. Moreover, Lukashenko accused the EU and other “Western organizations” of trying to “harm Belarus” by destabilizing the current regime while supporting the opposition.
The protesters have faced violent persecution by the authorities. A statement by the United Nations Human Rights Office on 1 September cited more than 450 documented cases of torture and ill-treatment of detainees, as well as reports of sexual abuse and rape.
Alexander Lukashenko has been the head of state of Belarus since 1994, and did not have a serious challenger in the previous five elections, resulting in being referred to as “Europe’s last dictator” by media outlets. Under his authoritarian rule, the government has frequently repressed the opposition.
Lukashenko had faced a greater public opposition amid his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which Lukashenko has denied as a serious threat. Of the five elections won by Lukashenko, only the first in 1994 was credibly deemed free and fair by international monitors.
On 9 August, all roads and entry points to Minsk were blocked by the police and army early in the morning.
In the middle of the day, the Internet in Belarus was partially blocked.
In the evening of the election day immediately after the close of polling stations, the Belarusian government-sponsored TV aired exit poll results showing a supposed landslide in which Lukashenko got 80.23% of the votes, while Tikhanovskaya received only 9.9%. The landslide was so great that even the pro-government part of the Belarusian population found that it was unlikely to be true. This caused an immediate reaction by supporters of Tikhanovskaya to head to the streets in all major cities in Belarus, such as Brest, Minsk, Vitebsk, Grodno, Mazyr, Pinsk, Gomel, and Babruysk. People were doing so to express their dissatisfaction and were calling for a fair count of votes. This started as peaceful protests in the middle of the night, but in Minsk, the situation turned into a fight between some people and the authorities. People started building barricades to block the traffic on the streets. It was hard to estimate the number of protesters in Minsk because the protesters were not concentrated in a single spot.
At night, after breaking up big crowds, police officers chased smaller groups of protesters through downtown Minsk for several hours. A fight against security forces and police continued in all major cities in Belarus. Law enforcement officers used police batons, rubber bullets (fired from shotguns), grenades with lead balls, water cannons, tear gas, and flashbangs. They used it to suppress the protests as people were chased in the suburbs all night.
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