Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, who suffered the indignity last week of seeing one of his sharpest critics win the Nobel Prize in Literature, won a prize of his own on Sunday: the presidency of Belarus, though that outcome had never been in doubt. Mr. Lukashenko, a former collective farm director who has led Belarus for 21 years, got nearly 83.5 percent of the vote, the Central Election Commission reported late Sunday, trouncing three token competitors and winning a fifth term.
Analysts of the country’s political system said the results, like those of many elections in the old Soviet Union, had been determined long before voters marked their ballots.
The election, in fact, would not have drawn much attention but for the announcement on Thursday that Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarussian journalist and nonfiction writer, had won the Nobel Prize. She has long been a prominent critic of Soviet and post-Soviet governments, including the one in Belarus.
Full Article: Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus Wins Fifth Term as President – The New York Times.