Luka the bad

The president is set to consolidate his hold on power in a sham referendum

BELARUS is not a lucky country. A third of its people were killed in the second world war; many others died in Stalin's purges. The nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, in 1986, contaminated a fifth of the country. Since 1994, the 10m Belarussians have been governed by President Alexander Lukashenka. Should Mr Lukashenka win a referendum on October 17th to allow him to run for a third term in 2006, they may be stuck with him indefinitely.

Independence was disorienting for Belarus, which had always been dominated by its Russian neighbour, and was even quite prosperous in the late Soviet era. After Mr Lukashenka, formerly a collective-farm manager, won the first presidential election in 1994, he set about reversing history. He retained the old name of the KGB and pursued a policy of ever-closer union with Russia. He also halted economic reforms, propping up state-owned enterprises, setting targets for growth and rebuffing advice from the IMF.

In other countries Mr Lukashenka has often been regarded as an eccentric but innocuous buffoon. To many compatriots, he is less amusing. “Of course Lukashenka is not Stalin”, says Anatoly Lebedko of the United Civic Party, “but he is his ideological grandson.” The president's opponents risk their liberty, livelihood and limbs, if not lives. Pro-democracy students have been expelled from universities and beaten up by the police. Mr Lebedko and other prominent politicians have been assaulted, and sometimes imprisoned. Human-rights groups are harassed by tax inspectors. In 1999-2000, three opposition figures and a journalist “disappeared” (“a tragedy”, says Ural Latypov, head of the presidential administration).

State-run television shows Mr Lukashenka exhorting ministers to realise his vision, and occasionally firing them for failing. That helps explain why he remains popular in poor villages and among the elderly. To be fair, pensions and state salaries are paid punctually, the economy is growing and inflation is relatively low. The president has vowed that average monthly wages will reach $195 by the end of the year. Even so, independent pollsters say he is not popular enough to win the votes he needs in the referendum.

Happily for him, in Belarus the counting matters more than the voting. Vintsuk Viachorka, of the opposition Belarussian Popular Front, has predicted “giant fraud on a nationwide scale”. After a referendum in 1996, Mr Lukashenka marginalised the country's parliament; but he is taking few chances with the parliamentary elections also being held on October 17th. Opposition candidates have been excluded from the ballots on what international election observers term “manifestly trivial or formalistic grounds”.

Mr Latypov says that, even if he wins, Mr Lukashenka may decide not to run for a third term. His critics hope that dissatisfied Belarussians will realise their own strength, or that the fractious opposition will unite. Pessimists predict redoubled repression after a referendum “victory”.

What can the rest of the world do? America's Congress has passed a Belarus Democracy Act, and is denying visas to officials implicated in “disappearances”, as is the EU. But such denunciations enable Mr Lukashenka to talk of a western vendetta. Mr Latypov says they are partly motivated by western disappointment at the success of the Belarussian economic model. They are also, he says, an indirect attack on Russia. Moves for closer union with Russia dissipated when Mr Lukashenka realised he might be a mere provincial governor. But Moscow still sees him as useful, however buffoonish and nasty.