Georgia’s ruling party leads parliament vote; opposition calls for protests

Preliminary results show that Georgia’s ruling party has taken the lead in parliamentary elections in the former Soviet republic, with the opposition rejecting the results and announcing plans for street protests.

Georgia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) said early on Sunday that Georgian Dream garnered 50.58% of the vote after some 44 percent of the votes had been counted.

The ruling party, founded by Georgia’s richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, declared victory soon after the initial results were released, but it was unclear whether the governing party would secure the votes needed to form a single-party government.

“Georgia has made me a worthy choice, and that Georgian Dream founded by me is a worthy dream. Georgian voters, who would not make the wrong choice today, expressed support for worthy people,” Ivanishvili told a crowd of cheering supporters in the capital, Tiblisi.

The commission also announced that the country’s largest opposition party — United National Movement (UNM) — only had 24.92% of the votes, with several other opposition parties having managed to clear the 1% threshold for membership in parliament.

The opposition claimed that the results failed to correspond with reality and called on supporters to gather in central Tiblisi to protest the vote.

“We won’t accept this result and call on people to come to Rustaveli Avenue in the capital Tbilisi at 4 p.m. (0200 GMT) on Sunday,” Nika Melia, one of the UNM leaders, told reporters after consultations with other opposition leaders.

The objection to the vote by the UNM leaders prompted Georgian police to deploy security forces in the area around the election commission’s building.

More than 30 opposition parties, led by the UNM, announced on Friday that they would not go into coalition with the ruling party after the election.

Voting in Georgia started early on Saturday and concluded after 12 hours, with observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring the tightly contested elections that pitted former Western-backed president Mikheil Saakashvili – who lives in exile in Ukraine – against Ivanishvili.

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Economy in the South Caucasus country has been hit hard due to the new coronavirus pandemic and is forecast by the government to contract by four percent in 2020.

Moreover, the Georgian government’s popularity has taken a nose dive after opponents accused Tbilisi of mishandling the economy, ineffective foreign policy and heavy-handed crackdown on dissent.

Both the government and the opposition would like to see Georgia join the European Union and NATO, but such moves would not receive much welcome by Moscow. Georgian Dream also favors closer ties with Russia.

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