(Reuters) -Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said in an interview published on Friday that he did not intend to seek another term, and denied he was lining up his son as a successor.
Lukashenko, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has led Belarus through more than three decades of authoritarian rule and was re-elected in January for a seventh five-year term.
In a long interview with TIME magazine, Lukashenko, 70, said he was “not planning” to seek re-election, although he teasingly added that U.S. President Donald Trump was “looking decent” at nearly 80.
He said that whoever replaced him should “not break anything right away” but keep developing the country in order to avoid any “revolutionary breakdown”.
Lukashenko rejected long-standing speculation that he might be grooming his son Nikolai to replace him.
“No, he is not a successor. I knew you would ask that. No, no, no. Ask him yourself, he may be really offended,” he said in excerpts from the conversation, published in Russian by Belarusian state news agency Belta.
Lukashenko crushed huge street protests in 2020 after an election that the opposition and Western governments accused him of stealing, and all his leading opponents were jailed or forced to flee the country.
Several hundred people convicted of “extremism” and other politically related offences have been released since mid-2024 in what analysts see as a bid by Lukashenko to ease his isolation from the West. However, human rights groups say nearly 1,200 are still behind bars.
Lukashenko denies there are any political prisoners in the country.
(Reporting by Mark TrevelyanEditing by Gareth Jones)
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