Belarus Presidential Candidate Pulls out, Calls Election Illegal :: Charter'97 :: News

One of the candidates for the presidency of Belarus has announced his decision to withdraw from the elections. Member and an ex-president of the Belarus Academy of Sciences Alexander Voitovich was quoted by RIA-Novosti as saying he did not want to contribute to “create illusions for electors that the participation of (current Belarus president Alexander) Lukashenko in the election is legal and that the election is held in correspondence with the Constitution and the Electoral Code.”

The election will take place on March 19. In December 2005 Lukashenko made a request to the Central Election Committee to register an initiative group that would nominate him for president. If he is nominated and wins the elections in March, he will have become president of Belarus for the fourth time.

Voitovich expressed disagreement with the fact that the representatives of independent candidates were not included in the election commissions. No candidate except for the current president has access to the state media, he added.

“The election campaign shows that the situation is the same and there will be no elections, in fact,” Voitovich said.

There are now seven people hoping to become president of Belarus, including Lukashenko and the opposition candidate Alexander Milinkevich.

Lukashenko first became president of Belarus in 1994. After two terms, in 2002, he held a referendum asking the people of Belarus whether they would “allow” him to run for the president for a third time although it was not allowed by the Constitution. The referendum cancelled the constitutional ban on a third term.

Lukashenko is regarded in the West as a suppressor of freedoms and opposition in his country. He has reintroduced Soviet symbols, disbanded parliament, closed independent media and maintained rigid Soviet-style state controls over the economy. Many opposition leaders have been jailed or have disappeared. The Belarusian leader has become a pariah in the West for his intolerance of dissent, and has accused Western governments of aiding opposition groups and seeking his removal. The United States has labelled him “Europe’s last dictator.”