The politics of Belarus takes place in a framework of a presidential republic with a bicameral parliament. The President of Belarus is the head of state. Executive power is nominally exercised by the government, at its top sits a ceremonial prime minister, appointed directly by the President. Legislative power is de jure vested in the bicameral parliament, the National Assembly, however the president may enact decrees that are executed the same way as laws, for undisputed time.

During Soviet times, Belarus had a communist political system that was constitutionally defined as a Marxist–Leninist single party socialist republic guided in part by the political ideas of Karl Marx, one of the fathers of historical materialism, as well as by Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. The sole legal governing party was the Communist Party of Byelorussia (CPB), which was permitted according to the constitution.

Belarus' declaration of sovereignty on 27 July 1990 did not stem from long-held political aspirations, but from reactions to domestic and foreign events. In particular, Ukraine's declaration of independence led the leaders of then Belarusian SSR to realize that the Soviet Union was on the brink of dissolving.

After the establishment of a Republic on August 25, 1991, Stanislav Shushkevich was selected to be the first Belarusian leader and held this position until 1994. Shushkevich hoped to guide the country away from its Soviet past and supported social democratic reforms. His successor, Alexander Lukashenko, upon assuming office in 1994, began to re-instate Soviet-era functions and reintroduced the symbols from Soviet Belarus.

Lukashenko heads an authoritarian government and has often been referred to as "Europe's last dictator". Elections are not considered to be free and fair by international monitors, opponents of the regime are repressed, and the media is not free.

The first attempt to establish a sovereign Belarusian state in modern history came in early 1918 with the declaration of independence of the Belarusian Democratic Republic. The short-lived state was destroyed by the Soviet invasion in 1919. The Rada of the Belarusian Democratic Republic exists as a government in exile since then.

The Bolsheviks created a puppet Soviet government of Belarus in Smolensk. In 1922, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Belarus joined the USSR together with Soviet-controlled Russia, Ukraine and Transcaucasia.

The March 4, 1990, elections to the republic's Supreme Soviet gave the country a legislature that was little different from previous legislatures: only 10 percent of the deputies were members of the opposition. But for the most part, the populace seemed satisfied with the new deputies (see List of Members of the Belarusian Parliament, 1990–1995), and the Belarusian Popular Front's (BPF) calls for independence and efforts at nation-building failed to stir up the same strong emotions as movements in neighboring Ukraine and the Baltic States. Although the Supreme Soviet of the Byelorussian SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic on July 27, 1990 (some two weeks after Russia had declared its own sovereignty), the March 1991 referendum held throughout the Soviet Union showed that 83 percent of Belarusians wanted to preserve the Soviet Union.^{[dubious – discuss]}