Belarus: A Mirror for the Anti-Maduro Cause - Caracas Chronicles

 

Belarus: A Mirror for the Anti-Maduro Cause

Belarusians couldn’t trigger a transition by calling out Lukashenko’s 2020 election fraud with protests and solidarity. What lessons are useful to Venezuelans?

Caracas Chronicles October 09, 2024

https://www.caracaschronicles.com/2024/10/09/belarus-a-mirror-for-the-anti-maduro-cause/

Drawing a parallel between Svetlana Tsikhanouskaya’s bid for the presidency in Belarus in 2020 and Edmundo González in Venezuela in 2024 is a sobering exercise. Venezuela’s president-elect wasn’t prepared for the blackmail and threats he faced after July 28, or for his forced exile—just as Tikhanovskaya hadn’t been four years ago in Minsk. This Belarusian teacher and mother of two found herself swept into the currents of history by sheer chance.

Like González Urrutia, Tsikhanouskaya never aspired to lead a mass movement. Yet, she became the face of an electoral surge in Europe’s most closed-off regime. She was tasked with leading a victory, and when it was stolen, a popular uprising—the likes of which Belarus had never seen. Tikhanovskaya was arrested the night the official results came out. Two days later, a video surfaced in which she reluctantly acknowledged Lukashenko’s “victory,” credited with 80% of the vote. Hours later, she was forced into exile in Lithuania, leaving behind her husband,Sergey Tsikhanouski, a digital activist and would-be presidential candidate who was imprisoned by Lukashenko. He remains behind bars.

The post-Soviet space—riddled with captured states, unfulfilled revolutions, great powerbalancing, ethnic conflicts, and destruction—offers lessons for Venezuela. One is the challenge of transforming institutions that have served kleptocratic rulers and dismantling the tools they’ve used to concentrate power and crush dissent.

The deadlock and the children of backsliding

Aleksandr Lukashenko, Belarus’s dictator, along with Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez, are part of a vanguard of leaders who froze their countries’ development, hijacked entire societies, and justified state terrorism as a necessity whenever change was on the horizon. Being outcasts from the international community doesn’t seem to faze them—it’s a reality they’ve embraced.

Maduro and “Luka” may not share ideologies or worldviews, but they do share an unwavering desire to cling to power at all costs and a visceral disdain for the West.

Like Chávez, Lukashenko moved swiftly to control institutions, the economy, and the police. After taking office in 1994, he purged military leaders, set up a Security Council packed with loyalists, and doubled the security budget. By 1996, he held nearly absolute power, altering the constitution and filling parliament with his allies. By 1999, any trace of pluralism was extinguished: the opposition leader died under mysterious circumstances, and a month later, a dissident former military leader disappeared. Lukashenko entered the new millennium with total control.

Despite decades of varying degrees of authoritarianism, both Venezuela and Belarus managed to build a network of grassroots activists and leaders, prepared for potential electoral openings—like those who rallied around the July 28 elections, many of them young, torn between hopes of democratic transition or forced migration. These Venezuelans, following María Corina Machado and González Urrutia, seek and need political space urgently. Without real change by 2025, these spaces could disappear entirely.

Meanwhile, in Belarus, young figures like Pavel Liber (head of the Golos initiative) and activist Lena Zhivoglod (of Honest People) played a key role in exposing the fraud Tsikhanouskaya denounced, using citizen organization and digital platforms to process photos of voting records. Sound familiar?

People like Liber and Zhivoglod had to flee after the fraud. Overthrowing Lukashenko in a militarized Belarus seems impossible. Efforts are now focused on protecting the exiled community and supporting organizations still operating within the country. As the persecution of leadership continues and political parties weaken, the question looms: will the Venezuelan counterparts of Liber and Zhivoglod face the same fate in the coming years?

Rebellion and the elites

Belarus may offer answers through another lens: Lukashenko’s relationship with his country’s economic elites, which he consolidated as soon as Belarus became independent.

Unlike other post-Soviet states like Ukraine, Lukashenko halted the privatization of Belarus’s industrial sector, preventing the rise of oligarchs independent of the state. In fact, up until 2013, state-owned companies represented 60% of Belarus’s GDP. Lacking institutional support for the opposition, Lukashenko had no trouble projecting himself as a strong leader and winning uncompetitive elections. Centralizing economic power may have been his greatest source of control.

In Ukraine—and in Russia until Vladimir Putin’s consolidation—economic power was divided among multiple elites and oligarchs born of the perestroika era. Some backed the ruling elite, while others eventually created their own political platforms to protect their interests, giving rise to figures like Poroshenko, Yushchenko, and Tymoshenko. That’s why liberal revolutions, mass protests, and electoral mobilization succeeded in removing presidents eight times in Ukraine’s modern history. Ukrainian opposition movements have been bolstered by economic elites, as seen in the 2014 Euromaidan protests that seized the heart of Kyiv for months, forcing pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to flee.

Belarus’s dissidents took to the streets fearlessly between August and September 2020. There was no shortage of heroism, despite mass arrests and torture. Around 200,000 people participated in the “March for New Belarus” on August 23; factory workers went on strike in solidarity and booed Lukashenko during a visit. Two weeks later, Lukashenko was seen flying over the protests in Minsk, brandishing an assault rifle from his helicopter.

Yet, despite the massive movement denouncing Lukashenko’s fraud, it was crushed by brutal repression and a lack offunding and logistical support for the resistance—key factors that had been decisive in Ukraine.

In Venezuela, the economic elite once represented a significant anti-Chávez force between 2001 and 2003. But Chávez swiftly set about dismantling private enterprise, much like Lukashenko. Today, those businesses that survived hyperinflation, price controls, and expropriations are careful not to project any discontent or desire for change, at least not since 2019-2020.

While these groups have sought to adapt to the bleak prospects for change and ensure their survival, questions remain about the long-term expectations for non-chavista oligarchs in the status quo. Without legal security, access to credit, or foreign investment on the horizon, can they thrive under an authoritarian peace, or can they aim for an actually prosperous and developed Venezuela?

The collapse of all mediation and the imposition of that authoritarian peace may be a prelude to what Belarus is today—atotalitarian experiment with no tolerance for dissent (or disagreements with Russia), democracy ghettos, or semi-competitive elections. Lukashenko now rules through a constituent assembly, much like Maduro’s 2017 version, and in February 2021 held parliamentary elections contested by four pro-government parties. By 2021, the aftermath of repression was comparable only to Stalin’s purges 90 years ago: 35,000 arrests, 4,690 indictments, and the exodus of about 400,000 people—roughly 4.5% of the population.

Venezuelans will need a great deal of creativity and courage to avoid a similar fate, one that increasingly mirrors our own.