End of suspense in Georgia. The electoral commission announced this Sunday, October 27, the victory in the legislative elections of the ruling pro-Russian party, the Georgian Dream. He won 54.08% of the votes, compared to 37.58% for the pro-European coalition, according to the count carried out in more than 99% of the constituencies.
Monitored by international observers, the vote was marked by several incidents, widely relayed online, such as this video of a fight in a polling station in Tbilisi or scuffles at the headquarters of the United National Movement. Images appearing to show ballot stuffing in Sadakhlo, a village in the east, were also widely shared by the opposition. The election commission canceled the ballots in this office.
During the night, before the electoral commission’s announcement, the opposition refused to concede defeat. “We do not recognize the distorted results of stolen elections,” Tina Bokoutchava, head of the United National Movement (UNM), one of the four parties in the pro-European coalition, declared at a press conference. Earlier in the day, she had accused the “thugs” of the Georgian Dream of “clinging to power” and “undermining the electoral process”, comments rejected by this party led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili.
“Constitutional coup”
Denouncing “a usurpation of power and a constitutional coup”, Nika Gvaramia, leader of the Akhali party, assured that the opposition had “deciphered the pattern of falsification” of the vote. The opposition accuses the Georgian Dream, in business since 2012, of pro-Russian authoritarian drift and of distancing Georgia from the EU and NATO, which it also aims to join.
“As shown by the results made public by the central electoral commission, the Georgian Dream has secured a solid majority” in the new parliament, the executive secretary of this party, Mamuka Mdinaradze, declared to journalists on Saturday evening. . The government said before the vote that it wanted to obtain three-quarters of the seats in Parliament, the bar essential for modifying the Constitution and, under its plan, banning pro-Western opposition parties.
Brussels warned that Georgia’s chances of entering the European Union would depend on these elections held in this former Soviet republic in the Caucasus of around four million inhabitants, which has enshrined this aspiration in its Constitution. Georgia was rocked in May by large protests against a “foreign influence” law, inspired by Russian legislation on “foreign agents” used to crush civil society.
Brussels subsequently froze Georgia’s accession process to the EU, and the United States took sanctions against Georgian officials.