Over recent days, world news has reported upon public unrest in Belarus on an unseen scale, with thousands of people protesting against the falsification of election results and facing an increasingly violent crackdown by the police force. At first, for president Alexander Lukashenko, this election was just another episode in a sequence of political manipulations that he has deployed to stay in power for twenty-six years. He seemed confident and well prepared for his sixth electoral victory, and he used every occasion to reassure the public that this time would be no different from his previous wins.

In the weeks preceding the election day, however, commentators and political analysts discussed the probability of alternative scenarios — a Belarusian Maidan, a revolutionary overthrow of power that would be followed by the escape of the president (some media even reported that Lukashenko’s plane was prepared for him to flee the country in case of an emergency) or the repeat of an Armenian scenario, with the peaceful transfer of power to the leaders of opposition after nonviolent rallies, as had happened in Yerevan in 2018.

Aware of these deliberations, Lukashenko had taken precautionary measures to ensure that protests would become difficult or even impossible to organize. In previous elections, the alternative candidates had been detained after the vote took place (Aliaksandr Kazulin in 2006, Andrej Sannikau and Uladzimir Neklayeu in 2010), but this time, the major presidential candidates were preemptively removed from the race.