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Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has built a highly consolidated, adaptive authoritarian regime. Examining how the Belarusian political system is structured and how its relationships with its citizens, Russia, and the West have evolved may help shed light on possible paths that Minsk could take as Lukashenko ages and economic challenges continue to mount.

The Consolidation and Evolution of the Belarusian Regime

• Since taking office, Lukashenko has maintained tight control over Belarusian politics.
• Lukashenko’s authoritarianism has been rooted in respect for Belarus’s Soviet past, weak state institutions (besides the presidency), state dominance of the economy, paternalism, close relations with Russia, and a heavy emphasis on political stability.
• To mitigate threats to the political system, Lukashenko carefully vets bureaucrats for loyalty, prevents the emergence of alternative centers of power, and heavily restricts organized mass protests.
• Yet, in recent years, Belarusian politics has evolved in important respects:
• The Belarusian regime has noticeably broadened the country’s self-identity by increasingly stressing its independence; pursuing a balanced, multivectored foreign policy; cultivating a Belarusian national identity; and projecting a neutral peacekeeping role in the region.
• Minsk’s foreign policy has become more pragmatic over the last decade. Belarus seeks to balance its ties with Russia and the West, while contending with declining material support from Moscow. The Belarusian government’s enthusiasm for Eurasian integration has declined, but Minsk realizes that Europe offers no mid-term alternative.
• Belarusian society remains largely pro-Russian, with a stable, sizable pro-European minority. Although many Belarusians lean toward Moscow in principle, they will not sacrifice their sovereignty and share the costs of Russian foreign policy.

Forks in the Road to Minsk

• Belarusian elites remain united around Lukashenko. The political system is likely consolidated enough to allow him to grow old in his post, though if he were to pass away unexpectedly, a chaotic power struggle could ensue in the absence of a chosen successor.
• In recent years, a group of progressive senior economic bureaucrats has emerged and is attempting to convince Lukashenko to at least undertake market reforms. If pursued, this course could eventually empower autonomous oligarchs and cause Belarus to transition to a softer form of authoritarianism.
• Some have speculated that Lukashenko could eventually use a constitutional referendum to shift from personalized rule to a ruling party that could rally support around a designated successor.
• Unlike Ukraine, Belarus is highly unlikely to experience revolutionary regime change or a sharply different foreign policy. Even if such changes happened in Minsk, Moscow would likely find it more effective and less risky to respond with economic statecraft than with military force.

Introduction

Belarus is the most Russianized of the post-Soviet countries, yet its relations with Russia have become more complex in recent years. On the one hand, Minsk is a military ally of Moscow, is linked to neighboring Russia by five integration-based agreements,¹ and is almost entirely dependent on Russia for economic resources. Belarus and Russia also enjoy robust linguistic and cultural ties.

On the other hand, over time, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has demonstrated that he highly values his country’s independence and sovereignty. He has managed to build one of the most consolidated, adaptive authoritarian regimes in the post-Soviet space, and perhaps in the world. Natural political intuition has helped him construct—despite Belarus’s lack of any special natural or strategic resources—a governing system that suits his methods of dealing with the Belarusian people as well as with external forces. When economic disputes and other disagreements between Moscow and Minsk have unfolded, Lukashenko has shown an independent streak and has courted European support to gain leverage when doing so suits him.

Despite Lukashenko’s longevity and success at maintaining his rule over Belarus, there are signs that his Soviet-era approach of state-driven economics and political repression will not last indefinitely. There are multiple political paths that Belarus could take in the coming years, and the country’s fate will depend largely on the short-term decisionmaking of Lukashenko and other political elites. The trajectory that Minsk follows could help analysts understand the complex ways leaders in the post-Soviet space navigate their relationships with Russia and the West to preserve their own political power, maintain domestic stability, and safeguard their countries’ sovereignty.

Consolidating the Belarusian Regime

The early years after Belarus achieved independence were a time of sluggish market reforms, low standards of living, growing corruption and criminality, and nostalgia among the bulk of the population for the stable years of the Soviet Union. Belarus had a weak national identity and lacked a tradition of democratic governance. Belarusian society exhibited pro-Russian sympathies and weariness about a Communist Party nomenklatura that continued to rule the now independent republic. All of these factors combined to create demand for what Lukashenko embodied; he was a young, energetic populist who could bring order, restore links with Russia, and replace all the crooks in power.

Lukashenko’s charisma, and the style and legitimacy of his rule, was and largely remains a grassroots phenomenon. For him, the institutions of formal democracy were a burden. Once elected, he almost immediately came into conflict with the parliament and the constitutional court. It took only two years for him to establish and consolidate a regime of personal power. The constitutional referendum of 1996 and the political decisions that accompanied it gave Lukashenko control of the executive and judicial authorities, the Central Election Commission, the local executive committees, the unions, the military and law enforcement structures, television channels, and the largest newspapers. The parliament lost its powers and any ability to oppose the president, whose decrees were set above the law.

Further attempts at consolidation followed. In 2004, after another constitutional referendum, presidential term limits were abolished. In the power vertical he has established, Lukashenko makes all key personnel and economic decisions, including the appointment and dismissal of heads of cities and districts, lower-court judges, and directors of major factories. Furthermore, the country has no ruling party through which elites can be rotated. Those appointed to senior posts must show personal loyalty to the president, share his views, and have the management experience that he deems appropriate.

Lukashenko’s consolidation of power went hand in hand with the marginalization of the opposition and the gradual narrowing of space for civil society and nonstate media to operate. That was the case until 2008, after which Lukashenko periodically would loosen the screws whenever he deemed it useful for geopolitical maneuvering and rapprochement with the West. Only the regime’s behavior was modified in such cases, however; the laws and institutions remained untouched or even became stricter, allowing for a quick return to the required level of repression at any moment.

Soon after Lukashenko came to power, the state reinforced its governing role with respect to the economy and rolled back the privatization that had begun. Influential security and supervisory authorities, heavy state regulation, subservient courts, and the ease with which any property could be nationalized all ensured the political loyalty of the business class. The economic model that Lukashenko has preserved from the Soviet era involves a great deal of government regulation, state monopolies, and income redistribution. Loss-making state-owned enterprises are supported through subsidies and favorable loans. Until recently, the state produced about 60 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and provided jobs for about the same proportion of the country’s working population.² In recent years, the country has grappled with an economic crisis that has affected certain elements of the welfare state—the pension age was raised, and moderate unemployment was permitted—but the system remains aimed at evening out disparities between the rich and the poor. Belarus has usually had a better Gini coefficient—a measurement of inequality—than most other countries in the region.³

Over time, one of the mainstays of Belarus’s authoritarianism has been the country’s relationship with Russia. Skillfully playing on Moscow’s imperial ambitions, and on its reluctance to lose an ally or risk political instability in an important transit country for Russian hydrocarbon exports to Europe, Lukashenko has managed to get consistent, if not entirely uninterrupted, economic and political support from Russia. This pattern has repeated itself often over the course of Lukashenko’s reign.

Maintaining the Belarusian Regime

Lukashenko has not limited himself to establishing institutional control over the country. He also has created a system to protect his authoritarian regime, with mechanisms to mitigate the three basic potential threats to its stability: mass protests, a schism or plot among the country’s elites, and external pressures.

Discouraging Protests

The regime has several tools to minimize the likelihood of mass protests that might escalate to the point of threatening its survival. First, a significant proportion of Belarusians are excluded from politics as a consequence of the state sector’s economic dominance. The country has a widely used system whereby employers are not obliged to extend labor contracts when they run out (usually after one year), so the authorities have a powerful lever for influencing the majority of the working population. Similarly, students risk being expelled from institutions of higher education, the majority of which are state-run, if they express political dissatisfaction.

Second, there are major bureaucratic obstacles to organizing protests. To carry out any mass activity, one must obtain permission from the local authorities. The sheer number of reasons for possible refusal is so large that appropriate grounds can be found for absolutely any occasion. Gathering thousands of people for an unsanctioned protest is difficult not just because a successful outcome is unlikely but also because potential participants clearly understand the risk of being arrested. The security forces routinely prevent opposition leaders and activists from reaching protest sites under various pretexts, such as drawn-out procedures for checking their documents or vehicle registration plates, preventative arrests ahead of possible mass protests, or subsequent detention for disorderly conduct after such demonstrations.

The authorities did not shy away from these practices until a brief détente that lasted from August 2015 to February 2017, during which people were merely fined for taking part in activities that had not received official approval. During this period of temporary liberalization, citizens displayed greater willingness to protest, as seen in the lessened public fears of taking part in protests against a deeply unpopular 2015 decree mandating tax payments by unemployed so-called social parasites. When this happened, the security services were ordered to renew their usual repressive practices.

The authorities are adaptable; they are prepared to use carrots as well as sticks to quell public discontent. Carrots are not used in the event of opposition activities such as protesting vote falsification during elections, when the discontented are simply treated harshly as enemies of the system. If, however, the authorities—and Lukashenko personally—sense that there is widespread societal unease behind particular protests, they may grant concessions to the main body of protesters. For example, in 2011, drivers, indignant at a sharp rise in petrol prices, blocked Minsk’s central thoroughfare, claiming that their vehicles had broken down. Several were detained and fined but, on the same day, the president personally lowered the fuel price.⁴ (That said, the higher price was eventually reinstated anyway though subsequent gradual hikes.) More recently, while the social parasite protests in the spring of 2017 were suppressed brutally with many detentions and arrests, Lukashenko delayed the enforcement of the decree and promised to strike its most unpopular provisions.⁵

Even as the regime makes concessions, it punishes the leaders of protests, thereby cutting them off from their followers and sending the majority a signal that there are limits that cannot be transgressed. Six months after the drivers’ protests, for example, the workers of one Belarusian mining company left an official union en masse and applied to join an independent union, while protesting over delays in wage payments. The workers’ leaders and the heads of the new union were fired, while the rest were paid their wages and received a pay increase of 50 percent.⁶

A third method of protecting the regime from the threat of protests is to employ propaganda to discredit the idea of protesting in and of itself, as well as to exploit a historical fear among Belarusians of social upheaval. This technique is a common characteristic of authoritarian regimes: they claim they are not violating human rights or constraining the opposition but merely protecting the people and domestic stability. Even the country’s national anthem begins with the words “We, Belarusians, are [a] peaceful people.” State media cultivates this image using stories about violent foreign revolutions and the wars and chaos that follow them as cautionary examples to deter protests.

Guarding Against Coups

Another serious risk for any authoritarian regime, especially a personalized one, is a plot, coup, or schism within the ruling elite. To prevent such machinations, Lukashenko uses staffing decisions to cultivate the idea that there is no feasible alternative to his leadership. As a rule, the president does not appoint to important posts charismatic or ambitious people who demonstrate too much initiative or who are too publicly active—especially to the position of prime minister. Those who occupy senior posts know this and try not to stand out, give too many interviews, or develop public profiles. Lukashenko’s aim is to ensure that neither elites nor ordinary citizens get the impression that someone has a stable hold on the number two position in the power vertical. There is no clear heir or favorite in the eyes of the elite, and one should not be allowed to appear. Moreover, to prevent officials from thinking that they are becoming untouchable and to keep them in line, Lukashenko regularly initiates criminal cases (usually on charges of corruption) against some of them. The rare cases, ten to fifteen years ago, in which high-profile officials went over to the opposition ended with various criminal charges being brought against them to make sure others got the message. In this system, betraying the president’s trust is the greatest sin.

The security structures—the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Security Council, the Investigative Committee, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Operations and Analysis Center, and the Ministry of Defense—balance one another out, and they sometimes compete with each other. The president’s security service stands out for its virtually unlimited powers. To forestall the formation of factions within the security services, and to prevent the personnel within one service from developing greater loyalty to their direct boss than to the president, Lukashenko regularly reshuffles their rosters. If he suspects that members of the security services are not as loyal to him as they once were, he immediately transfers them to positions without security powers or he forces them to retire.

Notably, there is no dynastic tradition of inheriting power in Belarus; being part of Lukashenko’s family does not furnish a potential successor with any added legitimacy in the eyes of the people or the elites. The president himself has stressed publicly that his children do not want to follow in his footsteps and that he does not see them as heirs.⁷ At present, his stance appears to be sincere. Of his three sons, the youngest, Nikolai, is still too young for the role of heir. His middle son, Dmitry, is not involved in politics in any way. The eldest, Viktor, though, appears to have at least some of the attributes required to be an heir, given that he is the president’s assistant on national security matters—and, in essence, serves as an overseer of the security services.

Managing External Pressure

The third potential threat to the survival of the Lukashenko regime is external factors, particularly those related to Russia. High economic dependence on Russia, the broad penetration of Belarus by Russian media, and the two countries’ military integration demonstrate the extent of Moscow’s potential ability to influence Belarusian politics. With this in mind, since the first years of his rule, Lukashenko has positioned himself so effectively as the only possible guarantor of Belarusian-Russian friendship that three successive Russian presidents, when faced with the choice of whether or not to continue propping him up during disputes, have always done so. Russian leaders have consistently viewed the cost of supporting Lukashenko as less than the price of keeping Belarus in Russia’s orbit if Moscow were to end support for Lukashenko, prompting uncontrolled regime change and internal disturbances.

To prevent Russia from getting any ideas about regime change, Lukashenko does not allow any pro-Russian opposition to form, and his security services shut down any attempts to create one. For example, a few years ago, the security services blocked an attempt by the Belarusian Slavic Committee to register as a party. Only a pro-European opposition is tolerated. There was not even political space for a pro-Russian opposition during the many years when Lukashenko was unequivocally pro-Russian. Those suspected of having overly close ties to Moscow are not allowed to occupy senior posts. In Lukashenko’s mind, Russia must not be allowed to develop a backup plan, and he must retain a monopoly on the pro-Russian wing of Belarusian politics.

A Marginalized Opposition

Despite Belarus’s reputation as the last dictatorship in Europe, several opposition parties function legally, as do dozens of nongovernmental organizations that are critical of the authorities. The regime allows them to exist as they fulfill three functions: legitimizing the political system, offering channels for citizens to let off steam, and keeping the discontented out in the open rather than underground.

The opposition represents the classic spectrum of European political leanings, including nationalists, Christian Democrats, free-market liberals, Greens, and Social Democrats. There is even a leftist party of former Communists who did not want to support Lukashenko twenty years ago called A Just World. By law, parties must have at least 1,000 members to be registered; although exact numbers are difficult to confirm, the best available estimates suggest that few existing parties meet this threshold.⁸ Some political campaigns and movements have been formed to support a specific candidate in the run-up to presidential elections. Their ideologies tend to be vaguer. Some of these movements last as long as their leaders, while others outlast their founders. All of these entities occupy positions against Lukashenko along four dimensions: (1) democracy or authoritarianism; (2) movement toward the European Union (EU) or integration with Russia; (3) cultivation or rejection of a Belarusian identity; and (4) a market or command economy. Each party emphasizes different policy issues. A Just World stands out for accusing the president and his government of undertaking unnecessary austerity measures. This leftist party does not insist that the country should move toward the EU; it is less noticeable and active than the pro-European forces.

Notably, opposition parties and candidates have never posed a serious challenge to Lukashenko’s rule. Public support for formal opposition parties has never really been high enough to have a discernable political impact, even during times when the regime’s popularity has been lower than usual.⁹ The main reason is that even discontented citizens have been disappointed by the inability of opposition parties to unite and present a consolidated agenda for the country’s development if they were to gain power. Continual internal disputes have exacerbated the opposition’s negative image.

This lack of a strong, unified opposition has been evident in the presidential candidates that have run against Lukashenko. In the 2001 presidential election, union leader Vladimir Goncharik was put forward as the single opposition candidate. In 2006, there were two: the leading opposition candidate, Alexander Milinkevich, and Alexander Kozulin, who was supported by those not satisfied with Milinkevich. In 2010, Lukashenko faced nine other candidates; the authorities registered them despite considerable doubts that many of them had collected the 100,000 signatures required to be eligible. In 2015, there was just one democratic opposition candidate—Tatyana Korotkevich—but other opposition figures deemed her criticism of the regime insufficiently vehement.

There are two reasons that the Belarusian opposition is so fragmented. First, it has a severe lack of qualified candidates and new faces. Some leaders have headed their respective parties for as long as Lukashenko has been in power. Just as the regime lacks a channel for societal feedback (given the absence of competitive elections), the opposition lacks a means of receiving popular feedback and attributes all failures to the regime’s actions rather than any of its own shortcomings.

Second, the opposition does not have the motivation to unite because even a broad coalition would not have any electoral success, since the votes are counted by people selected by the authorities and observers are prevented from monitoring the process. After years of unsuccessfully struggling against the regime without any hope of victory or success for the foreseeable future, opposition politicians see no point in sacrificing leadership positions in their small party structures to play second fiddle in a larger coalition.

The nonstate media, protests, and election campaigns remain the only communication channels between the opposition and the people.¹⁰ These channels are not enough to overcome the apathy of voters and dispel their mistrust. Most Belarusians do not regard the regime as something that can be changed; rather, they accept it as inevitable. They may complain about it when they are dissatisfied, but most people do not believe that uniting with an anti-regime coalition or going out into the streets to protest is worth the time and effort.

But even this weak opposition has some potential. Any protest requires political representation and coordination, even if it is apolitical at the outset. The only people who have at least some organizational experience and who can handle the basics of such activism are the representatives of the opposition parties. For example, given the lack of other parties to articulate public dissatisfaction, the opposition was swiftly able to take the lead on the 2017 social protests across the whole country against the social parasites decree.

An Upsurge of Belarusian Identity

When he was rising to power, Lukashenko had his own vision of Belarus and Belarusian identity. He drew a great deal on his own childhood experiences in a Soviet village, management of a collective farm, and political struggle with the nomenklatura of the day. The foundation of his ideology is the preservation and development of what he perceives to be the finest aspects of the Soviet past. The national democratic project of Belarus, proposed in the early 1990s, was not only alien to Lukashenko but was also alien to most of Belarusian society at large. About 83 percent of Belarusians voted to preserve the Soviet Union in a 1991 referendum.¹¹

There was, therefore, fertile ground for someone with Lukashenko’s views to come to power and take the first steps toward renewed Sovietization. A year after first being elected, he held a referendum that adopted slightly amended Soviet national symbols, made Russian a state language, and endorsed economic integration with Russia. In just a few years, subbotniks (the Soviet tradition of doing unpaid volunteer work on Saturdays), the cult-like commemoration of the Soviet victory in World War II, and the Belarusian Republican Youth Union (a revamped version of the Communist-era youth movement) all returned, along with the celebration of the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and other Soviet-era practices.

Over time, however, the country’s identity changed. As the people and elites got used to life in a separate state, arguments with Russia increased and enthusiasm for deeper, post-Soviet integration died out. Increasingly, and with ever greater sincerity, the authorities have spoken of sovereignty as the highest value. The term independent Belarus first appeared in Lukashenko’s main election slogan in 2015. Integration with Russia ceased to be the guiding lodestar of policy and was instead put forward merely as an economic necessity. The Belarusian regime now promises to follow that path only as long as it does not threaten the country’s sovereignty. In 2016, Lukashenko described the goal of integration as living in the same building as Russia but in a separate apartment.¹² This is not a new rhetorical device for the country’s leadership, but its usage has grown over the last two to three years.

The regime has promoted Belarus as an Eastern European version of Switzerland—a neutral party with respect to regional conflicts, particularly the one taking place in Ukraine. This stance led to a Belarusian aversion to taking sides in disputes between Russia and the rest of the world, whether with Turkey, Ukraine, or the United States. In this way, Belarus attempts to gloss over the fact that it is part of a union state with Russia and a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization. The image of Belarus as a regional peacemaker is fed by the prevailing narrative that the most important thing for the country is stability. The joint Belarusian-Russian military exercise Zapad, which took place at both countries’ training facilities in September 2017, became the most recent example of the allies’ diverging security strategies. While Moscow menaced the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) with adversarial rhetoric and concealed the numbers of troops participating in the drills, Minsk demonstrated quite a high degree of transparency, allowing dozens of NATO monitors into the country, moving the locations of the exercises away from the borders with Lithuania and Poland. The intention was to present Belarus as a constructive, reliable, and predictable partner, in contrast to the Russian Federation.

Following the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014, the Belarusian regime began to introduce elements of a nationalistic agenda. Light efforts to make the country more distinctively Belarusian began with a very gradual broadening of the use of the Belarusian language and the popularization of the country’s pre-Soviet history and national symbols. In 2014, Lukashenko gave a speech in Belarusian for the first time since the mid-1990s. The number of hours devoted to teaching Belarusian in schools has been increased. The authorities have become less aggressive about discouraging the use of national symbols; as one example, a fad for traditional embroidery has taken off, with distinctive embroidered patterns even appearing on the kit of the Belarusian national football team. In March 2018, the authorities allowed the opposition to hold one of the largest rallies it had in a decade, so as to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the Belarusian People’s Republic’s (BPR) proclamation of independence from Russia in the center of Minsk. Back in 1918, the BPR was the first (and an explicitly anti-Bolshevist) attempt to create a Belarusian state. In 2018, the authorities have switched their rhetoric toward the BPR from negative to either neutral or positive.

This upsurge in Belarusian identity is intermittent; the authorities are no longer obstructing it, although they have not demonstrated any particular enthusiasm for it. The security services have stopped focusing solely on their traditional target, the alleged fifth column of domestic nationalist pro-Western sympathizers. Several people have been fined for insulting the Belarusian language on social media, and three Belarusian contributors for the Russian news agency Regnum were arrested in December 2016 for inciting nationalist hatred after they strongly criticized Belarusian identity and sovereignty. They spent fourteen months in jail and were then sentenced to five-year suspended prison terms.¹³ It was the first time Reporters Without Borders has demanded that the Belarusian government release pro-Russian commentators.

At the same time, the regime is not rejecting its Soviet heritage. Lukashenko remains nostalgic for his youth. Every year, he performs subbotnik by volunteering with builders. He expresses his congratulations on the anniversary of the October Revolution, which he sees as the precursor to the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic that in turn was the forerunner of independent Belarus. For Lukashenko, participation in Soviet rituals is n