The cliché of Alyaksandr Lukashenka being Europe’s last dictator has aged poorly. The decline of democracy across the continent has seen a rise of tin-pot autocrats and would-be totalitarians, from Aleksandar Vucic in Belgrade to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Having monopolized the Presidency over the past 30 years, however, we can be confident in calling Lukashenka Europe’s longest serving dictator, and at a sprightly seventy years old, just two years Putin’s junior, one of the continent’s oldest. 

The carefully choreographed election at the end of January, returning a credulity straining majority of eighty seven percent, has seen the politician crowned in 2025 for his fourth decade in power. In Belarus, elections follow the same pattern we see across most contemporary authoritarian states – a performance of democracy, a ritual of legitimation, in service of justifying Lukashenka’s continuing monopolization of power.

But behind his sham majority we have the first signs of a genuine increase in the politician’s popularity. Data from Chatham House and the Centre for New Ideas Belarus Initiative indicate that public support for Belarus’ authorities has increased since 2020, a trend despite the context of the mass-protests of that year, in which hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets to challenge the stolen election, with Lukashenka characterized as ‘Sasha 3%’ to reflect his perceived unpopularity.

That public perception has improved since then is surprising. Violent repression, including systematic torture and the arbitrary detainment of opponents, has been the method of choice for the regime to regain control of the streets. This has seen Belarusians leave the country in their thousands, fleeing to neighboring European countries to escape the very real risk of violence. At the same time, Belarus has struggled under the weight of foreign sanctions imposed for its role as a staging ground for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with inflation steadily rising as the Belarusian ruble fluctuates alongside its Russian. These factors do not traditionally correlate with an improved perception of political leadership.

Political commentators have suggested several potential explanatory factors for this counterintuitive trend. Firstly, Belarus has avoided greater involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. Despite hosting Russian troops, Minsk has so far refused to send Belarusian troops to fight alongside their Russian counterparts, leading to a perception of Lukashenka having held the country out of the war. At the same time, the Belarusian economy, mostly reliant on agriculture and heavy industry, has seen greater Russian investment as the Kremlin has thrown everything at its economy to support the war effort.

Less discussed, however, but no less relevant, are the new tricks the regime has developed in the online space. Whilst Belarus is poorer and less developed compared to its European neighbours, its citizens are still as highly online, using social media to communicate and access information otherwise unavailable from their strictly controlled domestic media

During 2020, this saw the protests greatly supported by the use of messenger services, mostly typically Telegram, with self-organized networks of mutual support to help those demonstrating avoid violent arrest. At the same time, public-facing social media, such as Instagram, were flooded with emotive content, frequently with live streams and images from the protest to inspire greater support. Perhaps most memorable were the womens’ protests, with demonstrators of all ages facing off against armed riot police with only flowers in their hands.

With the regime scrambling for a solution to end the protests, the authorities’ response at the time was to entirely shut down the internet in Minsk. This removed the protestors’ most valuable tool in self-organisation and, in severing the connection between people, led to many arrests, as those in the Centre suddenly were in the dark as to police movements. Whilst not a new strategy for authoritarian governments, this moment was critical. It showed that Lukashenka’s regime had lost control not only of the streets, but of the online information space as well. Since that moment the Belarusian regime has introduced new strategies to wrestle the online space back under control and oppose online narratives that question Lukashenka’s legitimacy.

On the one hand these strategies have involved strengthening overt repression. In 2021, the Ministry of Information received expanded competencies in shutting down digital media, including blocking websites and preventing individuals involved in the banned sites from opening new media. New bans were introduced preventing the reporting of live events, including protests, online without accreditation, as well as the publishing of unofficial polls. Foreign media companies also came under fire from legislative acts allowing the Ministry of Information to shut-down their activities in the country. Finally, vaguely worded and arbitrary anti-extremism legislation has been used to widely suppress online activists. The resulting wave of arbitrary detentions has claimed the lives of four political prisoners arrested for their online posts since 2020.

The other side of this digital strategy has been less violent but no more subtle.

Russian speaking internet users the past few years may have been surprised to find an influx of strange new content: soft-focus compilations of a Lukasehnka’s greatest moments – proselytizing the health benefits of the potato, splitting logs with an axe Belarusian made, ice skating around a hockey rink – or otherwise loud and brash short video content praising his ‘manliness’ over a thumping phonk bassline. This is ‘Lukashenko core’, the latest attempt to re-invent the dictator for the TikTok generation.

This campaign has been led by a team of journalists and PR people around the President, self-described ‘enthusiasts’ of the leader with the nous to present Lukashenka in the visual language of social media. This ‘pool of the first’ (ru. pul pervogo), with Instagram and Telegram channels of the same name, have curated a softer presentation of Lukashenka as ‘Bat’kа’, a Belrusian colloquial term for ‘dad’, the congenial and straight-talking father of the nation.

This has seen а torrent of new propaganda content, including some particularly questionable musical accompaniment for the President’s new aesthetic. Herman Titov’s saccharine propaganda pop song ‘Bat’ka’paints a picture of the President riding through the fields on a combine harvester, whilst the band Aura’s song ‘Bat’ka – our cool guy’ (ru. bat’ka u nas krutoj) strikes a traditionally militaristic tone, with the President bravely guarding the border in military regalia.

The presentation of Lukashenka as the nation’s father originated in the 1990s, so while the tone and symbols are nothing new, the close attention to short-form meme-able content shows that as the generation of propagandists changes, new forms and languages of persuasive content develop. Modern discursive systems of meme culture and short-form video are just as susceptible to manipulation and co-optation as traditional media – despite the value placed on authenticity and originality in online spaces.

The extent to which we can claim these new tricks are successful is perhaps moot:  the political survival of Lukashenka, and the wider Belarusian political economy, has long been contingent on Russian support. Nevertheless, these examples show how the language and medial forms of authoritarianism change with the times. So, whilst the old dictator himself is perhaps too rigid in his ways to be taught new tricks, the propagandists and security forces around him are, rather loudly, charting a course towards Belarus’s new digital-native dictatorship.