On Sunday, the people of Belarus will vote to elect their new president, who will be the same as their old president, Alexander Lukashenko. The incumbent will win about three-quarters of the vote because, I’ve been reading, that is the share that he wants to receive. Which only shows that he is a slightly more sophisticated autocrat than his many late and unlamented predecessors in Eastern and Central Europe. (Or Western, for that matter.)

As the international troupe of people engaged in turfing out Europe’s remaining dictators has learned continuously since at least 1989, Lukashenko has been keeping up in the latest methods and defusing their effectiveness in Belarus. Enough opponents have disappeared to spread fear, but not so many that a certain percentage of the population doesn’t wonder if they somehow deserved it. The Belarus KGB kept its initials after the fall of the Soviet Union. It kept its buildings, personnel and methods, too, by all accounts.

The current methods of peaceful revolution involve nation-wide networks of discontents, visible action in many places, a super-brief slogan that gives hope to the people and ridicules the ruler, commitment to non-violence, co-optation of parts of the elites (particularly armed forces and/or police), international support and decisive action at a potential inflection point such as an election.

Lukashenko knows all of this and is applying state-of-the-art countermeasures: isolation of leaders, disruption of networks, tying jobs to political fealty, selective violence, buying loyalty of elites, subsidies from Russia and decisive action just before a potential inflection point. These methods cannot work forever–as Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa pointed out yesterday in the German newspaper whose website has marginally improved–but they can last through this next election.

Divining the situation within Belarus is of course difficult. (I’ve seen pictures from a “manifestation for freedom” in Pinsk that does not seem to have been reported on in sources known to Google News, for instance.) Journalists tend to parachute in from Moscow or elsewhere and do not have long-term contacts. Westerners who prove effective in working with civil society–like some people I know–are denied re-entry. But the measures the regime is taking show that it is worried, that people are restive and that a substantial number want to send Lukashenko back to his collective farm.

What seems missing from this vantage are links across areas, the ability to mobilize a large number of people, and connections within the existing power structure. I don’t think that Lukashenko will last as long as Castro, but I don’t think he will fall because of this election either. It will take more pushing, more organizing, more work, and a bit of luck here and there would not hurt either, but it will come.