Unsurprisingly, the “yes” won, Sunday, February 27, in Belarus, during a constitutional referendum allowing to strengthen the powers of President Alexander Lukashenko, aged 67, who leads this former Soviet republic with a hand of iron since 1994.
“65.16% of voters voted for the amendments to the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus”, announced, on the night of Sunday to Monday, the chairman of the Belarusian Central Electoral Commission, Igor Karpenko, quoted by Russian news agencies. According to him, 10.07% voted once morest. The turnout was 78.63%, according to the same source.
To be adopted, the amendments needed to collect more than 50% of the votes, the referendum being considered valid if more than 50% of voters took part.
Among the proposed changes are lifelong legal immunity for former presidents and the introduction of a two-term presidential maximum. If the Constitution did not envisage a limit on the matter before, this new provision would apply from the entry into office of a new president, which would allow Alexander Lukashenko to remain in power until 2035 if he is re-elected in 2025.
End of the obligation to be a “nuclear-free zone”
In the amended version, the obligation for Belarus to remain a “nuclear-free zone”. This article would be replaced by an article “excluding military aggression from the territory” Belarusian. At the end of January, the United States were alarmed that this reform would not allow the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, a country bordering Ukraine and Poland.
The referendum came as neighboring Ukraine is in the throes of a Russian invasion that began on February 24, as talks between Russians and Ukrainians, announced by both sides, are due to take place on the Belarusian border.
The re-election of Alexander Lukashenko as president in August 2020 sparked a historic protest movement, violently repressed by the authorities who carried out mass arrests, liquidations of media and NGOs. In Russia, a constitutional reform adopted in 2020 paved the way for President Vladimir Putin to stay in power until 2036.
