Belarus president extends three-decade rule in election denounced by West

MINSK/WARSAW: Belarus autocrat Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, won a seventh consecutive term in office on Sunday in an election denounced by the European Union and the exiled opposition.

With his opponents in prison or exiled, the 70-year-old ruler appeared to have won 87.6 percent of the vote according to an official exit poll.

Lukashenko has orchestrated a ruthless crackdown on opponents since huge protests against him in 2020. This time around, the candidates picked to run against him actually campaigned in his favour. Exiled opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya called the election a “farce”, while the EU described it as a “sham”.

And he had “no regrets” over letting his “older brother” Russian President Vladimir Putin´s troops enter Ukraine through Belarus in 2022 -- despite hundreds of thousands of deaths in the three-year conflict.

The vote took place five years into unprecedented repression in Belarus, during which time rights groups say the country has jailed more than 1,200 political prisoners.