Merkel Says She’ll Meet With Belarus Opposition Leader ‘Soon’

(Bloomberg) -- Chancellor Angela Merkel said she’ll meet with Belarus’s exiled opposition leader as she condemned President Alexander Lukashenko’s crackdown on demonstrators protesting his disputed election victory.

“We don’t recognize the election of President Lukashenko,” Merkel told lawmakers in Germany’s Bundestag on Wednesday, saying she would meet “soon” with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. “We call on him to enter into a dialog with his people, without any intervention from the West or the East,” she said.

Germany’s leader will follow French President Emmanuel Macron, who talked with Tsikhanouskaya on Tuesday in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, offering to mediate an end to Belarus’s political crisis. The opposition leader fled across the border to Lithuania after post-election protests were met with a violent police response.

“If you look at the courage of the women that’s being demonstrated on the streets for a free life, free of corruption, then I can only say that I admire that,” Merkel said.

Protests against the election have entered their eighth consecutive week, but Lukashenko has refused to meet his challengers or concede to any demands. After winning support from the Kremlin, Lukashenko has intensified a crackdown against the demonstrations, which he and Russian President Vladimir Putin have blamed on Western meddling.

The authorities revoked the media status of one of the country’s main news websites, Tut.by, and started a probe against Jahor Martsinovich, the editor-in-chief of another popular website Nasha Niva.

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