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28-10-2024
TBILISI: Georgia’s increasingly authoritarian ruling party has claimed victory after preliminary results gave it a clear lead in a pivotal election focused on the country’s future path in Europe.
The Georgian Dream party of billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili is on 53%, based on a count of 72% of the vote, the central election commission says.
The initial results were dramatically different from exit polls conducted by Western pollsters and the head of one of the opposition parties said they believed the vote had been “stolen from the Georgian people”.
“We do not accept the results of these falsified elections,” said Tina Bokuchava, head of the United National Movement.
Another opposition leader, Nika Gvaramia, said Georgian Dream had mounted a “constitutional coup”. Both Georgian Dream and the four pro-EU opposition groups trying to end its 12 years in power had earlier claimed victory based on competing exit polls.
Voters turned out in big numbers on Saturday in this South Caucasus state bordering Russia, and there were numerous reports of vote violations and violence outside polling stations.
One opposition official in a town south of the capital Tbilisi told media that he was beaten up first by a local Georgian Dream councilor, and then “another 10 men came and I didn’t know what was happening to me”.
A coalition of 2,000 election observers called My Vote said given the scale of vote-fraud and violence it did not believe the preliminary results “reflect the will of Georgian citizens”.
The opposition has described this high-stakes vote as a choice between Europe and Russia. Many saw the vote as the most crucial since Georgians backed independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
As soon as voting ended, two exit polls by Edison and HarrisX for pro-opposition TV channels gave Georgian Dream 40.9% and 42% of the vote, with the total for the combined four opposition groups put at 51.9% and 48% but a poll for the big, government-supporting Imedi TV channel gave Georgian Dream 56%.
Sometime later, the central election commission (CEC) came out with initial preliminary results.
The commission had said that 90% of the vote would be released within two hours of the polls closing enabled by new electronic vote-counting system, but by Sunday morning the count was still at only 72%.
The CEC has come under criticism for being too close to the government and for rushing through electoral reform ahead of the election without sufficient consultation.
“The onus is on a government body to provide transparency required in an electoral process,” said Dritan Nesho of HarrisX.
“We analyzed the data from these precincts and there’s a wide discrepancy from the data we have. In some cases they have districts in Tbilisi where Georgian Dream are winning by 45% of the vote, whereas we know most of the opposition vote came from Tbilisi.” Georgian Dream has already claimed an outright majority in parliament, as the combined four opposition blocs can only muster about 38% between them, according to the contested preliminary results. Under Georgia’s new system of proportional representation, whoever wins half the vote wins half of the 150 seats? None of the other parties fighting the election reached the 5% threshold to get into parliament. Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, told supporters it was a “rare occasion in the world for the same party to achieve such success in such a difficult situation”. (Int’l News Desk)
