Alexander Lukashenko announces run for seventh term as Belarus president

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has announced that he will run for a seventh term in the country’s next presidential election in 2025, Belarusian state news agency BelTA reported on Sunday.

Lukashenko asked journalists to “tell [the exiled Belarusian opposition] that I’m running” after voting in the country’s parliamentary and local council elections on Sunday.

“No one, no responsible president would abandon the people who followed him into battle,” Lukashenko continued, adding that “nowhere in the world has elections as open and fair as in Belarus”.

The Belarusian president also warned that exiled opposition politicians would “agitate” society in the runup to the 2025 election and said that he would “do as Belarus needs”.

Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya tweeted that Lukashenko should “just coronate [himself], while her chief advisor Franak Viačorka commented that the Belarusian president was “terrified of repeating 2020”, when mass anti-regime protests swept the country.

Viačorka added, warning Belarusians to expect “intensified repressions”.

Lukashenko has held power in Belarus since 1994, making him Europe’s longest-serving ruler. Sunday’s elections, condemned as a “sham” by the United States, marked Belarus’s first nationwide vote since the 2020 presidential election, which the international community condemned as rigged in Lukashenko’s favour.

This weekend’s parliamentary elections were “held in a climate of fear under which no electoral processes could be called democratic," the US State Department said, noting that free and fair elections would be impossible until the country’s 1,400 political prisoners in Belarus were released.