Georgia on the way to a new Ukraine?
Parliamentary elections were held in Georgia on 26 October 2024. The West has only one goal – to overthrow the current government.
René Zittlau
Introduction
In July, we focussed on the complicated political situation in Georgia. We went into detail about the role of NGOs operating in the country under Western leadership. The law ‘On the transparency of foreign influence’ discussed in the article, which significantly restricts the activities of NGOs, has now been adopted by parliament against the veto of Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili.
In order to categorise this political tug-of-war and understand the positions of the actors involved, it is sufficient to refer to the statement by the American ambassador to Georgia, Kelly Degnan, on this law:
The US opposes the Foreign Agents Act in Georgia, even if it is copied verbatim from US law.
Relations with the West are far from relaxed. Many players were therefore eagerly awaiting the outcome of the elections.
Election sequence
26 October 2024
The election also took place using so-called voting machines, which are gradually gaining acceptance in many countries. They facilitate the counting process. On the other hand, they are said to be susceptible to electoral fraud.
When the polling stations closed and even before any votes had been counted, the opposition and NGOs levelled accusations of vote rigging, which continue to this day.
The count on election night produced a relatively clear picture:
With a voter turnout of 59 per cent, the result was the following distribution of votes:
Ruling party Georgian Dream: 54.3 per cent
The opposition together achieved 37.3 per cent of the vote, which breaks down as follows:
Coalition for Change: 11.2 per cent
Unity – National Movement: 10.7 per cent
Strong Georgia: 8.72 per cent
For Georgia: 7.73 per cent
The other participating parties failed to reach the 5 per cent threshold.
The government reacted calmly to the accusations and did something that the opposition and its supporters had probably not expected: it ordered the votes to be counted manually on 27 October 2024.
27 October 2024
Without waiting for this count and without presenting any evidence, President Salome Zurabishvili, who is of French origin, attacked the government and also accused it of rigging the election. In order to be able to categorise this step, I refer you once again to our July article.
But Salome Zurabishvili did not stop there: she called a meeting of all the parties that took part in the elections – but did not invite the ruling party and apparent winner, Georgian Dream. Not her first offence.
At the meeting, the president called on the opposition parties to demonstrate on the evening of 28 October against the election results and the government. After the meeting, she turned to the Georgian people and also called for mass demonstrations in Tbilisi on 28 October.
And that was not all: after the meeting, the opposition parties declared that they would not use the mandates they had won, i.e. that they would boycott parliament.
The next fact proves that this whole agenda was not made up out of thin air:
At 3 pm on 27 October 2024, the Western election observers from the OSCE, EU, PACE, PACE PA, NATO PA, European Parliament, to name but a few, held a press conference on the results of the election. The heads of well over 500 Western observers addressed organisational aspects, but their main concern was to declare that they had identified ‘cases of vote buying and double voting’ and that the election results therefore did not meet European standards.
At the same time, the presence of camera teams in the polling stations and aggressive exit polls after the vote were criticised for putting voters under great pressure.
Curiously, at the same press conference, they praised the government’s organisation of the elections.
Despite all the insinuations and accusations, the heads of the delegations remained vague. They did not provide any concrete evidence to back up their accusations.
It is important to understand this: Everything that has been said so far about 27 October happened at the same time as the Electoral Commission was manually recounting all the votes cast.
Here is the result of that second count:
Government party Georgian Dream: 53.9 per cent
Coalition for Change: 11.03 per cent
Unity – National Movement: 10.1 per cent
Strong Georgia: 8.8 per cent
For Georgia: 7.7 per cent
The manual count thus confirmed the results published by the Election Commission on the day of the elections, the deviations are minimal and do not affect the final result.
Here are some interesting facts:
In the major cities of Tbilisi, Rustavi, Kutaisi and Batumi, the ruling Georgian Dream party received less than 50 per cent of the vote and lost to the opposition overall. The ruling party made gains in the rest of the country. In areas where ethnic minorities (Armenians and Azeris) predominate, the Election Commission recorded 70-90 per cent of the vote for the ruling party.
Conclusion
From all that is known so far, the parliamentary elections in Georgia were fair. By immediately ordering a manual recount of the votes cast, the Georgian government pre-empted the apparently coordinated provocations of opposition parties, NGOs and Western election observers and put an end to these attacks.
Both camps failed to achieve their goals. The ruling party wanted a two-thirds majority, which would have allowed it to push through constitutional amendments and, most importantly, the banning of Saakashvili’s former party, Unity – National Movement.
The opposition achieved a cumulative majority over the ruling party in the major cities. It wanted to overthrow the government, but did not even come close to doing so. It remains to be seen what the majority in the major cities is worth, as some of the opposition forces are very divided.
It should also be noted that a significant number of experienced Maidan fighters travelled from Ukraine in the run-up to the elections with the stated aim of overthrowing the government in Georgia.
The situation in Georgia is still tense. The West wants an escalation.
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