The opposition has lost its bet in Georgia. According to the results announced by the electoral commission on the morning of Sunday, October 27, Georgian Dream, the party in power since 2012, came out on top in the parliamentary elections held the previous day with 54.08% of the vote and a turnout of 58%. This success will enable the party of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili to form a new government and bring his country closer to Russia's orbit.
Obtained in record time thanks to a new electronic voting and counting system, these results were not complete on Saturday night. The final results were announced on Sunday morning, after all the electronic and paper ballots had been counted by hand. This did not prevent Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin's closest ally within the European Union (EU), from hailing the ruling party's "crushing" victory early on.
In Georgia, there is great disappointment among the opposition. With 37.58% of the total vote, the four opposition parties entered Parliament, but they will not be able to form the pro-European coalition government they had imagined. Their fear now is that Georgian Dream, with its authoritarian, pro-Russian drift, will dash the country's hopes of EU membership. Tbilisi's introduction in June of a law on "foreign influence" – a copy of Russian legislation used in 2012 to gag Russia's burgeoning civil society – has been described by Brussels as an obstacle to Georgia's integration.
"The election is not just about changing the government, it's a question of survival, because Ivanishvili's government is affiliated to Russia," Nika Gvaramia, one of the founders of the Coalition for Change, said before the poll. With 10.92% of the vote, his group became the country's leading opposition party, overtaking the United National Movement (UNM), founded by former president Mikheil Saakashvili. Under the banner of the Unity-Saving Georgia coalition, this party only came third with 10.12% of the vote. No sooner had the preliminary results been announced on Saturday evening did both parties declare they were contesting them, and would shortly be calling on their supporters to take to the streets.
During the night, some 30% of the votes remained to be counted. These included votes cast by Georgians living abroad, as well as those cast at a few polling stations in isolated villages. These voters cast their ballots by slipping them into the ballot box, while the rest of the country tested electronic voting for the first time: 80% of polling stations were equipped with imposing machines where voters insert their ballots after making their choice in the polling booth. After the polls close, the ballots are counted by the machine. Implemented for the first time in a country marked by allegations of fraud and manipulation, this system, deemed reliable, was approved by the Electoral Commission and all the parties.
You have 54.63% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.