Social:Europe's last dictatorship

Europe's last dictatorship or Europe's last dictator, and variations thereof, have been used in Western media to refer to  Belarus and  Alexander Lukashenko respectively for almost two decades. Lukashenko has been the president of Belarus since Belarus became independent in 1994. He has been elected in six elections, in 1994, 2001, 2006, 2010, 2015 and 2020 which were declared to be democratic and fair by official sources but have all but the first one been disputed by international organisations such as the OSCE and other more established democratic countries. Since the last elections in 2020, there have been mass protests in Belarus and Lukashenko is not recognised as the legitimate president by the European Union, the US nor the UK but rather  Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya the main opposition candidate.

The term has been used by leading national media in several Western countries including, the US, UK, Denmark, and France to name a few.

Background

According to American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington there is a general historical trend discernible toward democratisation of governance in the form of waves of democracy. According to him, the democratisation of the Eastern bloc constitutes the third wave. Exceptions to this general trend have been termed as democratic backsliding.

Use of term

The first documented use of the term 'last dictator' is from a BBC article from 2001 published in the wake of the September 11 attacks. That article states that: "Belarus began to earn its reputation as Europe's last communist dictatorship in 1996, when Mr Lukashenko used a referendum on constitutional changes to rid himself of an awkward parliament."

In the article "Dark Days in Belarus" published in the Journal of Democracy in October 2002, in an issue dedicated to democratisation, political scientist Roger Potocki refers to Lukashenko as "Europe’s “last dictator”" in the opening sentence.

Since then the terms have increasingly been used to describe the country and it's leader. In a statement to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2005, Condoleezza Rice, then US secretary of state, listed Belarus as one of six countries she termed outposts of tyranny. She elaborated that Belarus failed the so-called "town square test": if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a "fear society" has finally won their freedom. In a CNN interview a couple of months later she described Belarus as Europe's last dictatorship.

More recently two critical books were published in 2011, one by political scientist Andrew Wilson published the book "Belarus: The Last European Dictatorship" and the other by former UK ambassador to Belarus, Brian Bennett, "The Last Dictatorship in Europe: Belarus Under Lukashenko". There is an abundance of both academic and general media using the terms.