Svetlana Tikhanouskaya, a 37-year-old former English teacher, is causing a political earthquake in the former Soviet state, posing the biggest challenge in decades to the country’s strongman leader, President Alexander Lukashenko.
A political novice, she has emerged as the leading opposition candidate as the country heads to general elections on August 9. Her platform: The release political prisoners and the holding of free and fair elections in a country that has been called Europe’s “last dictatorship”.
“People are tired. The people want change,” told Reuters in a recent interview. “How long can you rule the people against their will? Our president is in power, as I said on the television, not because the people want it but because he doesn’t want to step down.”
Tikhanouskaya only entered the race in May, replacing her husband Syarhei Tikhanouski, a blogger who was jailed on what she says are trumped-up charges.
But she has become the figurehead of a protest movement that has seen some of the biggest opposition rallies in the country since the fall of the Soviet Union.
“Something happened in people’s minds and people began to organize themselves,” Tikhanouskaya. told Reuters. “When they arrested Syarhei, the leader of a large group of people, everyone should have dispersed without a leader, but people demonstrated such a sense of self-organisation that they attended the protests to sign petitions.”
Other opposition figures have united behind Tikhanouskaya, including another jailed candidate, Viktor Babariko and Valery Tsepkalo, who fled to Russia last month, fearing for his safety. It was he who dubbed Tikhanouskaya the country's "Joan of Arc".
Lukashenko has governed Belarus since 1994. Under his rule, opposition leaders and protesters are
frequently arrested and detained while elections under his watch have been dubbed unfair and fraudulent by Western observers.
He has said Belarus is not ready to vote for a female president while his government has accused Tikhanouskaya’s husband of working with a group of Russian mercenaries in a recent attempt to destabilise the country.
Tikhanouskaya says she also fears for her safety and that of her children but will continue to take on Lukashenko, even if her chances of winning the election have been judged slim by most analysts.
“I am tired of being patient. I am tired of being silent. I am tired of being afraid,” she told a recent campaign rally in Minsk. “And you - are you tired of being patient? Are you tired of being silent? Are you tired of being afraid?”
