Dr Donnacha Ó Beacháin

Dr Donnacha Ó Beacháin, associate professor at DCU School of Law and Government, spent months in Minsk in the run-up to the 2010 presidential election while researching his book, The Colour Revolutions in the Former Soviet Republics: Successes and Failures.

Following that election, in which Lukashenko claimed a landslide victory with a supposed 80 per cent of the vote, Dr Ó Beacháin observed peaceful protesters marching from one end of “the O’Connell Street of Minsk” to the other.

“I remember being struck by the ingenuity of the regime in holding an election in December,” he told Irish Legal News. “It was minus 20 degrees. I was wearing two pairs of socks and I could barely stay there, it was so cold. I was wearing a big hat and I was still freezing.”

The atmosphere “turned sour” after protesters reached the office of the Presidential Administration of Belarus, which was protected by riot police officers, and someone smashed a glass door – and “to this day, I’m convinced that person was an agent provocateur”, he said.

“That was used afterwards as the reason why the police could round up hundreds of individuals as they did,” he explained. “I managed to get out of the metro before I was rounded up too.”

Despite the protests, Dr Ó Beacháin said it was clear from his visits to Belarus in 2009 and 2010 that Lukashenko also commanded a substantial base of support, largely due to his economic and social policies.

“He had a lot of support and one of the reasons is that he’s brought in a kind of neo-Soviet model of economic and political stability,” he said.

“There’s a social contract whereby people don’t have maybe the same individual liberties that we might expect in western countries, but they have subsidised jobs, which was a feature of the Soviet regime – lots of people cleaning the streets, for example. It’s very much a state-led economy.”

Stability has been Lukashenko’s “trump card”, with the president pointing to near-neighbours like Ukraine as examples of instability and uncertainty arising from political change.

However, a cooling relationship between Belarus and Russia, as well as shocks to the Russian economy, particularly in the wake of the 2014 annexation of Crimea, have hurt the standard of living in Belarus, and the COVID-19 crisis has damaged Lukashenko’s stature even further.

“Most people had the basic economic necessities under Lukashenko during his first 15 years, but in the last decade there has been stagnation, even recession, and that obviously has political implications”, Dr Ó Beacháin said.

However, he warned that Lukashenko has learned from the colour revolutions that have unfolded across other post-Soviet countries in the past two decades.

“I wouldn’t say it’s predetermined that Lukashenko will lose power on this occasion. There’s a lot of people speculating that this is the end.

“It’s very difficult to get independent information because there’s internet being locked down, there’s an absence of independent opinion polls, and many commentators are very anti-Lukashenko – which is fine as a political position, but doesn’t mean that they’re reporting all aspects of reality.

“Lukashenko’s regime may not be right now in a state of absolute terminal decline. He may see this out. The question then would be for how long and at what cost.”