Belarusian Opposition Activist Defends Candidacy In Landslide Presidential Poll

The lone opposition candidate in Belarus’s presidential election earlier this month has defended her decision to run against authoritarian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka despite criticism that her participation may have been used to lend legitimacy to the poll.

Tatsyana Karatkevich, an activist with the Havary Pravdu (Tell the Truth) movement, said on October 22 that ignoring the election that Lukashenka won in a landslide would have made the opposition look no better than the government in the eyes of voters.

“We see how authorities today are actively ignoring the population and not respecting them,” Karatkevich, who finished second with an official vote tally of 4 percent in the October 11 election, told a briefing at the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan research group based in Washington.