Lukashenko claims he rigged the last presidential elections in favour of the opposition

The Belarusian President says that he did this so that the elections would be recognized in the West.

“We rigged the last elections, I have already told the West about this. 93.5% voted for President Lukashenko. They say that that’s not a European showing. We made it 86% … And if we now undertake a recount of the ballot papers, I don’t know what to do with them at all. Before the elections they told us that if there are approximately European figures at the elections, we’ll recognize your elections. We planning to produce European figures. However that, you see, didn’t work out”, Oleksandr Lukashenko stated on 23 November at a press conference in Minsk for  Ukrainian journalists. According to him, the West had promised that if the elections were European, “everything will be fine”. “We make them European – and not so”, he stressed.