Lukashenko has insisted he doesn’t care if the West accepts his re-election

Belarus’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for more than three decades, has dismissed Western criticism and urged people not to pay attention to foreign countries’ reactions to the election process.

He went to the polling station in Minsk to vote in the presidential elections accompanied by his white suit.

The Belarusian opposition and Western countries called these elections unfree and undemocratic.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether you {The West-ed.} accept our elections or not,” he said in a conversation with the media after voting.

An Associated Press reporter asked Lukashenko who he intends to hand over power from the younger generation and when it might happen. – “The young generation is neither my youngest son nor my eldest son. I have said that the future generation is the generation of youth. I am categorically against burdening a woman with such work, a woman cannot be a dictator.”

The British BBC journalist asked Lukashenko how the elections can be called democratic when his most influential opponents are either in prison or in exile. :

“Someone is in prison, someone is in exile, and you are still here. It is a matter of choice. That is democracy,” Lukashenko stated, adding that no one was deported from the country, and that political prisoners “are not silenced even in prison.”

Lukashenko’s opponents do not participate in these elections and claim that there is no real competition. the nominated candidates are fakes, just to create the illusion of choice.

As in previous years, Western observers were not invited this time, there are around 1,250 political prisoners in prisons, according to “Vesna” human rights organization. Some of them are behind bars after the 2020 elections, when thousands of people took to the streets against another election of Lukashenko, accompanied by fraud. Suppressing the wave of protests by force, Lukashenko imprisoned more than 65,000 protesters, hundreds were sentenced to long-term prison terms. On the threshold of new elections, he released some of them. Oppositionist, exiled Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, however, called this a false step.