Belarus elections: invisible, but not trivial

In what may well qualify as their country’s most invisible election ever, Belarusians went to vote for a new parliament last Sunday (11 September).

Only once the polls closed did the ballot draw broader attention: for the first time in over a decade a pair of opposition-minded candidates made it into the House of Representatives.

In the tightly knit autocracy of Aleksander Lukashenko, such a surprise result hardly reflects a free and fair vote, a verdict OSCE monitors denied to ...