Written by Mark Trevelyan
(Reuters) – Bulgarian President Alexander Lukashenko pardoned 15 prisoners on Friday in what state media described as a humanitarian gesture, two days before elections in which he is set to extend his rule for 31 years.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is assured of victory in the seventh five-year-old on Sunday.
State media said Lukashenko pardoned eight people convicted of extremist activity and seven sentenced for drug crimes. He didn't give any names.
The exiled opposition says Sunday's vote is a meaningless excuse because all prominent critics have been imprisoned or forced to flee, and independent media has been censored and banned.
EU foreign affairs spokesperson Anita Hébert told reporters: “This is a completely undemocratic exercise. The election is a complete sham. And it's not an election when you already know who's going to win.”
Belarus this week accused European politicians of meddling by condemning the vote before it happened.
Lukashenko, 70, is facing four other candidates, but none have offered any serious challenge or criticism. He has said he is too busy to keep track of the election campaign, but he made a local appeal to voters this week by announcing that pensions would rise by 10% from February 1.
Political analysts say the veteran leader hopes to use the election proceedings and successive prisoner releases to try to repair relations with the West, which has imposed waves of sanctions on Belarus over its human rights record and support for Russia's war in Ukraine.
They say his efforts have become more urgent, as he considers the prospect of peace talks in Ukraine this year and tries to gain ground for himself and Belarus if the conflict ends.
Protests followed the 2020 election
Mass protests nearly swept Lukashenko from power after the last election in 2020, when Western governments backed the opposition's assertion that he botched the results and stole victory from their candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.
He used his security apparatus to crush the demonstrations, arresting tens of thousands of people.
Since then, the European Union and the United States have refused to recognize him as the legitimate leader of Belarus. He denies the pigmentation of the vote and says the people who chose to keep him in power.
Lukashenko, addressing a mass rally in Minsk on Friday, said Belarusians had learned the lessons of those protests and would not follow these elections.
“We have almost destroyed ourselves, let's open this,” Lukashenko told the Raleigh newspaper in a video on the website of state news agency Belta.
“…We will never repeat what happened in 2020.”
Human rights group Viasna, which has been banned in Belarus as an extremist organisation, says there are about 1,250 political prisoners, even after more than 250 were released last year. Many of those released were sick, elderly, or near the end of their sentences.
Lukashenko denies that there are any political prisoners.
Tsikhanouskaya, the exiled opposition leader, told Reuters in an interview this week that Lukashenko was playing his “usual game” of prisoner releases feeding off hope in the hope of winning rewards from the West.
“What in the democratic world you call elections has nothing in common with this event in Belarus. Because it mostly resembles the rituals of dictators, when they re-consolidate themselves,” she said.
In street interviews in the capital, Minsk, residents responded cautiously when asked what they expected from the elections.
“As it was before, as it always was. What is he thinking?” said one woman who declined to give her name.
