NOT 99%?

Putin Ally Lukashenko Brags After Being Re-Elected With 87% in Sham Vote

“Everyone has the right to choose,” Lukashenko said of his political opponents, who he said could go to prison or flee.

The three-decade long rule of vindictive Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, 70, was extended another six years Sunday, following a staged election condemned as a sham by Western governments. After a crackdown on protests against his rule in 2020, Lukashenko has increasingly turned his country into a vassal state of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, letting Moscow use its territory to stage its invasion of Ukraine and to host missile launchers. Lukashenko’s four opponents on the ballot were all loyal allies who praised him and ran to give a supposed legitimacy to the vote, which he won with a comfortable 87 percent. Meanwhile, his political opponents have either been thrown in prison or forced into exile. “Everyone has the right to choose,” Lukashenko told the BBC on Sunday, in a sadistic brag. “That is democracy. Some chose prison, others chose exile.” According to the UN, roughly 300,000 Belarusians have fled the country since the 2020 crackdowns. Exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya—whose democracy activist husband is in prison—called Sunday’s vote a “farce.”