One in five Latvian residents has time for Belarus dictator Lukashenko / Article

A public opinion poll of 1,003 people conducted by the research center “Norstat” in cooperation with LSM.lv asked Latvian residents their opinion of Lukashenko. The results may be a cause for some concern.

Ethnic Latvian residents mostly view Lukashenko’s tenure across the eastern border negatively, but among Russians and Russian-speakers, Lukashenko’s image is more positive.

There is also a surprisingly large section of society that finds it difficult to form an opinion on the man responsible for the mass jailings and occasional deaths of his political opponents, who hijacked a Ryanair flight in order to capture a dissident and who launched a brutal crackdown when the Belarusian public tried to vote him out of office.

According to the survey data, 34% of all respondents assess Lukashenko’s actions very negatively and another 11% assess them rather negatively – meaning 45% of residents basically disapprove of him – which it turn means the majority takes a different view in one way or another.

8% of respondents express their opinion about Lukashenko’s actions very positively, another 13% assess them rather positively. So 21% of Latvian residents – more than 1 in 5 people – could be said to approve of the dictator.

Perhaps just as remarkably, more than a third of respondents (34%) said that they have no particular opinion about Lukashenko – despite his boasts about sending waves of illegal migrants across the border into Latvia, among his numerous other despicable actions.

The survey revealed significant differences in how ethnic Latvians evaluate Lukashenko’s actions and what the opinions of Latvian Russians and Russian-speakers are.

61% of Latvians evaluate Lukashenko’s actions very negatively or rather negatively, though even 10% of Latvians have a positive opinion of Lukashenko.

Meanwhile, among Russians and Russian-speakers, a positive opinion of Lukashenko is considerably more widespread. 39% of Russians and 38% of Russian-speakers approve of the Belarusian leader’s actions. There are also more people in these groups who refrained from expressing a specific assessment of Lukashenko’s actions: 44% and 43%, respectively.

Armands Astukevičs, a researcher at the Center for Eastern European Policy Studies, believes that over time, Latvian society’s assessment of Lukashenko has generally changed for the worse.

“The fact that part of Latvian society still has a positive view of Lukashenko can be explained by several considerations. One of the explanatory factors could be that a certain part of society does not have a strong opinion about what is happening in Belarus, especially if we remove the foreign policy context – the migrant crisis it has created and the close relations with Russia,” he said

“However, a significant factor is that Lukashenko, as the leader of Belarus, is not as polarizing a political figure as Russian leader Vladimir Putin. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Belarusian issue has become secondary for most Latvians,” he added.

Andis Kudors, a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Latvia, points out that one of the factors that may explain Lukashenko’s greater popularity among Russians in Latvia may be a hangover from the period before 2022, when Russian disinformation channels were still freely available in Latvia and Lukashenko was always portrayed in a positive light.

“It should also be taken into account that Lukashenko speaks Russian in public, and this can create a certain perception of ‘one of their own’ among Russians in other countries. Such a factor does not exist for Latvians, however, a certain number of Latvians also long for a firm hand,” admitted Kudors.

Kudors pointed out that the fact that 34% of respondents have no opinion can also be interpreted in part as concealing their true opinion, aware that supporting a dictator is not the opinion of the mainstream in Latvia, especially since the failed revolution in Belarus in 2020. 

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