Aug 10, 2020 - World
The world's longest-serving leaders
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko's grip on power is being tested like never before in his 26-year tenure, with clashes across the country following Sunday's sham election.
The big picture: Lukashenko has weathered more storms than most. Just nine leaders who were in power when he was elected in 1994 — during Bill Clinton's first term — are still in office.
The longest-serving leaders all represent countries considered “not free” by Freedom House. They're also all men.
- Germany's Angela Merkel is the longest-serving leader of a “free” country and the longest-serving woman, after 14 years in power.
- Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, Sudan's Omar al-Bashir and Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika all dropped off the "longest-serving" list last year.
- Meanwhile, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Rwanda's Paul Kagame and Syria's Bashar al-Assad have recently marked two decades in power.
- What to watch: Uganda's Yoweri Museveni faces an election early next year that will be competitive — if he allows it to be.
Worth noting:
- We're only counting a leader's current tenure in their country's highest office (with a slight exception for Putin), and we left off monarchs like Queen Elizabeth II who aren't top political decision-makers.
- We also left off countries with populations under 1 million.
Go deeper: Belarus protests turn deadly
