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Belarus elections 2024 and the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly: What you need to know [1]
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Date: 2023-12
Belarus is preparing for its first elections since 2020, when protests broke out over the results of the presidential vote and Alexander Lukashenka’s security forces conducted a brutal crackdown on Belarusian society.
February will see elections to local councils and the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Belarusian parliament.
Then a new body, the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly, will in turn be appointed by the newly elected regional and national authorities.
Lukashenka calls the People’s Assembly “the highest body of democracy”, and rewrote the country’s constitution to accommodate it last year.
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The assembly will contain 1,200 delegates, but power will primarily lie with its leadership committee (or ‘praesidium’) – a group of up to 15 people, and ultimately with Lukashenka, who as the body’s chair will be tasked with appointing them.
These elections and the rise of this new institution will be a serious stress test for the Belarusian authorities on the way to the 2025 presidential campaign – as well as an important stage in the totalitarian transformation of the Lukashenka regime.
‘A ritual without meaning or justice’
The power of local councils and Parliament in Belarus is small. Under Lukashenka, these bodies have performed a purely decorative function, constituting just another echelon of faceless officials. That is why parliamentary and local elections have never aroused much interest among Belarusians: usually such campaigns have taken place calmly, without protest.
There is little reason to believe that the parliamentary elections of 2024 will break this trend. Under Lukashenka’s mass repression, the price of any political activity has become excessively high. The experience of the 2020 crisis has shown that the Belarusian security services can target not only alternative candidates and campaign teams, but also people who support their nomination. Even calling for votes to be counted honestly can get you up to three years in prison. It is unlikely people will want to risk their freedom and health for an election campaign that will decide nothing anyway.
Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Belarus’ exiled opposition leader, has called for a boycott of the elections, describing the upcoming campaign as “a ritual without meaning or justice”. Most likely, this will take the form of high abstention levels.
The events of 2020 became a traumatic experience not only for Belarusian society, but also for Lukashenka. Despite few advance warnings of a growing political storm, the 2020 election ended in the largest mass protests in Belarusian history.
The government is therefore seriously preparing for the February 2024 elections, especially since the parliamentary campaign is a kind of “system test” before the 2025 presidential elections. As Lukashenka put it in October: “We are entering a difficult period. And they are preparing for this – the West. We see this and are ready for any scenario.”
Thus, Belarusian security forces are currently training in how to disperse mass protests and conducting mass searches of members of the opposition Coordination Council. They plan to make the personal data of members of election commissions secret, so that they do not fear being publicly ostracised for participating in election fraud. A ban has been introduced on photographing or filming a completed ballot, after protesters in 2020 used ballot images to try and organise a new vote count. The authorities have refused to set up polling stations abroad, meaning several hundred thousand political emigres will be excluded from the election process. And specifically, as an antidote to the boycott strategy, the election turnout threshold has been eliminated.
It seems that the 2024 elections in Belarus will be held without even a minimal imitation of the democratic process. All opposition political parties that could nominate alternative candidates in the elections have been officially liquidated over the past year. As a result, only four “pocket” pro-government parties remain in the country.
No leadership transition in sight
The real action, then, is the launch of the All-Belarusian People’s Assembly.
The assembly was initially conceived simply as a forum of Lukashenka’s supporters, convened during important political campaigns and used for propaganda purposes to imitate “national support”.
But after 2020, Lukashenka decided to make the People’s Assembly into the “highest representative body of democracy”. The assembly would be given extraordinary powers to give Belarus a “safety net” in case “the wrong people come to power and they have different views”. In accordance with this plan, the Constitution of Belarus was changed in February 2022.
The People’s Assembly was given the right to impose martial law and a state of emergency, repeal legal acts and decisions of other government bodies, elect and remove judges of the Supreme and Constitutional Court, and appoint members to the country’s central election commission, which oversees both local and national elections. Most significantly, however, the People’s Assembly can remove the president in case of systematic violation of the constitution or treason, as well as deciding on the legitimacy of elections and giving “binding instructions to government bodies”.
At first, many saw the rewriting of the constitution to give the People’s Assembly ultimate power as preparation for a leadership transition. By controlling the new super-influential body, Lukashenka could transfer the presidential post to his successor, at the same time retaining absolutely all the levers of influence on the situation and the status of a kind of “leader of the nation”. Lukashenka himself fueled these expectations. “Under the new constitution, I will no longer work with you as president,” Lukashenka promised at the end of November 2020.
But it seems this was just a ploy to defuse the post-election crisis: additions to the constitution have made it clear that the document serves only to further consolidate Lukashenka's power. The law is written in such a way that Lukashenka (and only he) has the right to be simultaneously president of Belarus and chair of the People’s Assembly. And in March 2023, Lukashenka made it clear that the debate over the transition of power was closed: he called on the nomenklatura to stop all discussion of successors and “not to dwell on this topic” any more.
Lukashenka’s Politburo
All the same, the formation of the People's Assembly will still be a serious test for the regime’s internal stability.
The People’s Assembly itself is a massive institution, with potentially up to 1,200 members. The entire assembly will meet only in the format of congresses. The frequency of meetings is specified in the law as broadly as possible: at least once a year. But at the same time, a kind of Politburo, an executive committee of up to 15 people, will operate on an ongoing basis.
Lukashenka, of course, plans to completely control this new centre of gravity in the regime, but legally he will not be the sole leader – rather the head of a collegial body. Now the informal hierarchy of the dictator’s inner circle will be institutionalised, which will allow these people to feel much more confident and, perhaps, lay claim to expanding their influence.
Who will ultimately join Lukashenka’s Politburo is the most intriguing question.
In the wake of 2020, the Belarusian security forces took leading roles in the state, severely reducing the influence of the dictator’s civilian circle. Against this background, the model of Lukashenka’s relationship with the Belarusian security apparatus has also changed: if earlier he often scolded them publicly and carried out large-scale personnel shuffles, then in the last couple of years, it seems, he has tried to avoid any conflicts with them.
For example, when a successful sabotage was carried out against a Russian military aircraft at a Belarusian airbase in February this year, Lukashenka merely praised the security services, promising them new awards. In previous years, he has not hesitated to retire his generals after less significant failures of the power bloc.
Episodes where Lukashenka has made the solution to a particular issue dependent on the opinion of the country’s security apparatus are even more revealing. In autumn 2022, when the Belarusian authorities discussed a large-scale amnesty for prisoners, Lukashenka hinted that some political prisoners could also be released, saying that “one cannot be stupid”. However, general prosecutor Andrei Shved, supposedly the most influential hawk in Lukashenka’s circle, publicly opposed the release of political prisoners, and his point of view ultimately prevailed.
Even if Lukashenka perhaps played the public role of a “good cop” in this case, it still indicates a new level of influence of the Belarusian security apparatus. Lukashenka himself understands perfectly well what it looks like from the outside. As Lukashenka once remarked: “Many people say: Lukashenka no longer rules the country here. It’s either Putin or the security forces that rule the country.”
If the praesidium of the People’s Assembly includes mainly Belarusian security officials, this will further fuel their ambitions and strengthen their position in the state system. There are already calls from state propaganda to give the Belarusian security forces the chance to express their “iron pro-presidential position” at the People’s Assembly.
But the growing power of the security forces in the country could also prove dangerous for Lukashenka. And so it is likely that he will do the opposite: he will form a Politburo from the civilian nomenklatura, in order to counter the influence of the security apparatus.
Indeed, the law on the People’s Assembly points towards the second scenario. Delegate places are reserved for representatives of Belarus’ executive, legislative and judicial bodies; the law does not directly mention law enforcement agencies or the military. There is no formal ban on security officials, but Lukashenka is unlikely to be interested in including them.
One way or another, the formation of the People's Assembly and the election of its praesidium will formalise a new configuration of the regime and perhaps lead to a redistribution of influence among representatives of Lukashenka’s inner circle. What happens next in Belarus may depend how painlessly the system can go through this stage of totalitarian transformation.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/belarus-elections-2024-all-belarusian-peoples-assembly-alexander-lukashenka/
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