The Protests
The protests in Belarus have largely been due to the handling of Covid-19 and the results of the 2020 presidential election by Alexander Lukashenko and his government. Within the country of 9.4 million people, there have been 565,000 cases as of October 2021. Belarus has remained as the one of a few countries that have not gone into a lockdown due to the virus. In the presidential election, Lukashenko garnered 80% of the vote with the largest opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya receiving only 10% of the vote. There is widespread belief that these results were fraudulent with polling conducted by the Center for East European and International Studies of Humboldt University finding that 52.5% of those polled who participated in the election voted for Tsikhanouskaya with only 17.6% voting for Lukashenko. These issues of the handling of Covid-19 and the presidential election have served as a catalyst for the issues that the people of Belarus have been dealing with since ind
