Lukashenko: Soviet-style strongman on Europe's doorstep for 26 years

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko gestures as he delivers a speech during a rally of his supporters near the Government House in Independence Square in Minsk, Belarus 16 August 2020Reuters

Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko is a former collective farm boss who has used Russian backing and Soviet-style political oppression to run a personal fiefdom on Europe's doorstep for 26 years.

The plain-talking 65-year-old is now fighting for survival after winning a sixth term in an 9 August election that looked so rigged that hundreds of thousands braved the notorious security services and came out on the streets.

The unprecedented week of protests prompted Lukashenko -- sweating in the sun and waving his clenched fists for emphasis -- to call on supporters "for the first time in a quarter century, to defend our country and its independence".

But more and more Belarusians, who openly referred to their mustachioed leader as "the cockroach" ahead of the vote, are demanding that he resign.

Lukashenko is now looking hopefully for support from Russian president Vladimir Putin as he casts protestors as pawns in a Western plot to destabilise the country.

It is a tactic he has used with ruthless effectiveness to justify jailing generations of opponents and using the all-powerful KGB security services to oversee most facets of the agrarian nation's political and social life.

Yet even workers at the biggest and most important factories are laying down their tools and publically saying that Lukashenko lost to the 37-year-old political novice Svetlana Tikhanovskaya in the presidential race.

Even some law enforcement are showing solidarity with the people thronging the streets across the nation of nine million.

"Lukashenko must answer for the torture and dead," one protest placard read.

'Why cry now?'

Lukashenko almost instinctively reverted to the use of brute force to try and crush protests that sprung up even before the polls officially closed.

He used mass arrests in which hundreds -- including almost all the main rivals and some of their family members -- were jailed to stamp out another wave of election protests in December 2010.

Those demonstrations quickly subsided and few have dared rise up since -- until this month.

Lukashenko's unrepentant use of force in 2010 only further reinforced his reputation as the overseer of "the last dictatorship in Europe".

His violent dispersal of demonstrators this time around was equally unapologetic.

"Why weep and cry now?" he said after the first wave of post-election protests saw dozens injured and at least one person killed in disputed circumstance.

Folksy machismo

Lukashenko's authoritarian streak stretches to his views on women and even some aspects of his personal life.

He has been appearing with his youngest son Nikolai at state functions and even some official foreign trips since the 15-year-old was a toddler.

Lukashenko's latest election declaration said that he is still legally married but few can recall ever seeing the wife he wed in 1975.

He has said that Belarus could not possibly have a woman leader because she "would collapse, poor thing."

Amnesty International has accused Lukashenko's government of "misogyny" and targeting female activists with discriminatory tactics.

He concluded an argument over rights in 2012 with Germany's openly gay former foreign minister Guido Westerwelle by saying: "Better to be a dictator than gay."

This machismo is accompanied by a rural folksiness that appealed to voters who were still used to the stiff octogenarians that dominated Soviet political life around the time of the superpower's collapse in 1991.

Lukashenko likes being filmed driving tractors or picking watermelons and potatoes. He once gave US action actor Steven Segal a carrot that he cleaned himself with a peeler and joined Putin at amateur ice hockey matches.

He has also brushed off the dangers of the coronavirus as a hoax and refused to introduce a lockdown or postpone the election.

Lukashenko's health tips for the virus included drinking vodka and taking steam baths.

Difficult ally

Yet these peculiarities make Lukashenko into an unpredictable ally for Putin and have turned the once-heralded "union state" between Russia and Belarus into little more than a political declaration.

Lukashenko watched with worry as Russian troops seized Crimea and intervened in eastern Ukraine in the wake of the 2014 pro-European Maidan protests.

He has occasionally switched from Russian to Belarusian to distance himself from Moscow and has dangled the promise of political and social changes long demanded by the West.

Lukashenko welcomed US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in February -- the first visit to Minsk by Washington's top diplomat since 1994.

This month's election was preceded by the mysterious arrest of what Belarus claimed were Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group.

The arrests sparked a crisis in relations with Moscow.

But Putin quickly congratulated Lukashenko on his re-election and spoke to him twice by phone over the weekend as the rallies spread.