Sergey Tihanovski and Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the two prominent opposition leaders from Belarus, will address MEPs.
In 2020, Sergey Tihanovski ran as a presidential candidate. He was arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison for “organising riots” and “inciting hatred” and then to 18 months extra for “insubordination”.
His wife, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, entered the presidential race in her husband’s place and ran against Aliaksandr Lukashenka, who was declared the winner of the fraudulent 2020 elections.
The European Parliament agreed, in a text adopted in October 2020, that Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was president-elect in the eyes of the Belarusian people and that her Coordination Council was the legitimate representative of the people of Belarus.
After the 2020 presidential elections in Belarus, the Lukashenka regime launched a brutal and systematic crackdown on peaceful protests against the fraudulent election result. Since then, the Belarusian authorities have pursued a campaign to shut down civil society, silence independent media and eliminate all forms of political opposition.
In January 2025, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, won a seventh consecutive presidential term. Opposition leaders and activists did not react to the vote, as most had been jailed or gone into exile, and no dissent is tolerated inside the country.