Ruling party wins legislative elections, observers denounce “pressure”

Photo: Giorgi A.rjevanidze Agence France-Presse Supporters and members of the ruling Georgian Dream party attend a rally at the party headquarters after the exit polls were announced for the parliamentary elections in Tbilisi on October 26, 2024.

Romain Colas – Agence France-Presse and Irakli Metreveli – Agence France-Presse

Published at 8:44 AM

• Europe

Georgia’s ruling party has won parliamentary elections, but the pro-Western opposition denounced the vote as “stolen” and international observers on Sunday denounced “pressure” on voters and a backlash against democracy.

The opposition says the victory brings the Caucasian country closer to Moscow and further away from European Union membership, a goal so dear to many people that it is enshrined in its constitution.

The Georgian Dream won 54.08 percent of the vote, compared with 37.58 percent for the pro-European coalition, according to a count carried out in more than 99 percent of constituencies, Central Election Commission Chairman Giorgi Kalandarishvili.

The vote “took place in a calm and free environment,” he added, despite several violent incidents widely relayed on social networks on Saturday.

The vote in this Caucasian country was “marred by inequalities (between candidates, editor's note), pressures and tensions,” however, estimated on Sunday observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), NATO and EU bodies.

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The ruling party enjoyed “numerous advantages,” including financial ones, there were “cases of vote buying,” and attacks on the “secrecy of the vote,” they listed in a statement, while one of these observers, Spanish MEP Antonio Lopez-Isturiz White, deplored a “setback for democracy” in Georgia.

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“Instability”

During the night, the opposition, which had initially claimed victory based on exit polls, refused to concede defeat.

“We do not recognize the rigged results of stolen elections,” Tina Bokoutchava, leader of the National Movement, said at a press conference. United Nations (MNU), one of the four parties in the opposition coalition.

The government is expected to win 91 of the 150 seats in parliament. A majority sufficient to govern but short of the three-quarters threshold it wanted to obtain to amend the constitution and, under its plan, ban pro-Western opposition parties.

The country is entering “a period of instability,” says analyst Gela Vasadze of the Center for Strategic Analysis on Georgia, judging the country's European hopes to have “vanished.” But “the opposition lacks charismatic leaders who could channel popular anger,” he continues.

Convinced that the Georgian Dream “stole the election,” Mariam, 32, who does not give her name, does not know what attitude the opponents will adopt: “Continue to protest again and again, or do what the Belarusians did, leave the country.”

Georgia was rocked in May by mass protests against a “foreign influence” law, modelled on Russian “foreign agents” legislation used to crush civil society.

Brussels froze the EU accession process in the aftermath, and the United States imposed sanctions on Georgian officials.

The opposition accuses the Georgian Dream, in power since 2012, of pro-Russian authoritarianism and of pushing Georgia away from the EU and NATO, which it also aims to join.

Brussels, which did not respond on Sunday, warned that Georgia’s chances of joining the EU would depend on the elections in the former Soviet republic of around four million people. of inhabitants.

The first foreign leader to react on Saturday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, the only EU leader who has remained close to Moscow, hailed the ruling party's “overwhelming” victory.

“Great neighbour”

Another cause of tensions with the West: a law severely restricting the rights of LGBT+ people in this country with an Orthodox Christian tradition where hostility towards sexual minorities remains strong.

Some Georgian Dream leaders are very critical of the West. Its leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has called them a “world war party” that would treat its victim Georgia as “cannon fodder.”

This country on the shores of the Black Sea remains deeply scarred by a brief war in 2008 with the Russian army.

At the end of the war, Russia set up military bases in two Georgian separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, whose unilaterally proclaimed independence it recognized.

In this context, the Georgian Dream campaigned as the only one capable of preventing a supposed “Ukrainization” of Georgia.

This was the argument that guided Temuri Titovi, a 52-year-old entrepreneur: “That’s how it is, there’s such a big neighbor. Whether we like it or not, we have to have relations” with it.