JOliver returned to the Last Week Tonight studio for the first time since the spring of 2020 on Sunday night, with a segment on Alexander Lukashenko, the unpopular autocratic leader of Belarus who was facing rising unrest.
Despite widespread national protests against his nearly 30-year rule over the past year, state-approved exit polls said Lukashenko won the 2020 election with an 80% majority. “Which was immediately weighed down for a couple of reasons,” Oliver said. “One, the massive subsequent protests, and two, the idea that any man could still be popular after nearly three decades in public view.”
The recent protests were sparked in part by dissatisfaction with Lukashenko’s treatment of the pandemic, which “was incredibly reckless from the start,” Oliver said. He is the European leader who once described the virus as “psychosis” that can be treated with vodka and saunas, and who later denied its existence in a crowded hockey game, as he could not see the virus “fly “.
Lukashenko is also the self-described “last and only dictator in Europe,” which is “just an amazing thing to say,” Oliver said, as “bragging about being the last dictator” is like bragging about being the last RadioShack or the last person to make a movie with Harvey Weinstein – that’s how it is no an enviable title “.
For a generation of young Belarusians involved in the protests, Lukashenko is the only leader they have ever met. The 67-year-old former producer won Belarus’ first free and fair elections in 1994, three years after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the promise of raising taxes on the rich and fighting corruption. “It looked great, and at the time it was genuinely popular,” Oliver explained, “but for all the positions of Lukashenko’s common man” – he once gave Russian President Vladimir Putin two sacks of potatoes and a tub of lard – “his promises to fight corruption quickly collapsed.”
Just five months into his presidency, Lukashenko banned press coverage of a government report on corruption that appointed senior officials; local newspapers printed blank pages instead of their stories. Lukashenko subsequently replaced the editors-in-chief of four leading newspapers and put national television and radio under state control, “creating such a hostile environment for independent journalism, Belarus is now considered the most dangerous country in Europe for members of the media, ”Oliver said, with journalists routinely subjected to violence, arbitrary arrests, interrogations, beatings and more.
According to reports, Lukashenko’s pettiness even extends to banning members of the press from filming the back of his head, due to his baldness. More seriously, he has repeatedly denigrated LGBTQ people, praised or at least interpreted him as a “devil’s advocate” for Hitler, and treated anti-Semitism “the way fashion treats low-rise bell bottoms; recovering it, even when it was never acceptable at any point in history, ”Oliver said.
Lukashenko has operated “from the standard authoritarian playbook” to consolidate and codify his power, Oliver added. Through controversial referendums, he extended his first term, concentrated power outside the legislature, and finally removed the terms of office in 2004. Groups of outside observers have reported that none of his last five election victories have been legitimate.
“For almost three decades, Belarus has experienced a brutal cycle of oppression in which Lukashenko wins elections neither free nor fair, closes his political opponents, people take to the streets in protest and are violently repressed,” Oliver summed up. “It is not surprising that the Belarusian people seem to have had enough.” A recently leaked poll showed that only a third of Belarusians trust Lukashenko, “which is impressively low considering, remember, he controls the national media.”
The United States, the United Kingdom, the EU and Canada have imposed sanctions on Belarus, but “the truth is that sanctions can only do so much here,” Oliver said, “and Lukashenko does not seem willing to end his reign.” .
“Right now, it seems that the only thing that will really improve things in Belarus is that the people who are there somehow manage to reform its constitution and ensure that free and fair elections are finally held,” the host concluded. . Given Lukashenko’s recent crackdown on human rights activists and journalists and the purge of political opponents, “fighting for these changes will be incredibly risky. But there may be a very small way we can help here. ”Or at least“ annoy Lukashenko’s shit ”with one of his less-preferred methods of protest: teddy bears stuffed with pro-democracy messages.
“If we know he hates something other than gay people, Jews, his own bald head and anyone who disagrees with him, they are teddy bears,” Oliver explained, as bears are “all what it is not: beautiful, charming and covered with thick, natural hair all the way through ”.
Oliver directed viewers to Last Week Tonight’s Belarus Bear Force website, where you can buy small teddy bears with “Farmer Lukashenko” vegetable t-shirts arranged in a phallic setting, ahem, with all proceeds going to organizations that they fight for freedom of the press and human rights in Belarus.