TOL Georgia

Parliamentary Elections in Georgia: who will be the winner?

April 27th, 2008 by jibs

Saakashvili’s party “National Movement” will win the parliamentary elections with a 52-53% of votes in their favor. This is a prediction of course, but any other result is simply hard to imagine.

Although it is not because the Presidents’ team is popular at the moment — on the contrary, they aren’t having the best of times. After the Speaker Nino Burjanadze announced her retirement from the Georgian politics and from the ruling party, the authorities look rather depleted of their popular faces.

Also, since the Presidential elections this January very little has changed: the opposition regards Saakashvili as an illegitimate president, alleging that he rigged the elections. After a series of mass protests, the opposition postponed this issue until the parliamentary elections in May — claiming that as a majority in the parliament they would initiate his impeachment.

After the presidential elections in January, the opposition drew up list of demands which they saw as a precondition to fair elections in May. The authorities rejected these demands and instead wrote up their own memorandum, outlining the issues they would be willing to discuss.

After repeated talks, dialogues, promises, etc. almost all of the issues raised by the opposition were left unanswered. Moreover, the authorities changed the tact on the compromises they were willing to make. As a result, the situation remains tense and unfavorable for free and fair elections.

Here is what head of PACE monitoring mission to Georgia Matyas Eorsi has to say about the pre-election conditions:

The political tension in Georgia is certainly less than it used to be several month ago. Still, however, there is a huge lack of trust and confidence among the political players, what we find very dangerous. [We are] seriously concerned about the low level of political trust in administration of the elections.

Low level of trust in the election administration is a precondition for things going wrong. The election administration has repeatedly discredited itself for covering up the violations during the last election in January.

For instance, Georgia’s public defender was consistently obstructed by the Central Election Commission from viewing the polling station video recordings. And when finally he was able to view a sample of the recordings after 3 months (!!!), he discovered grave violations which were rejected as “groundless”.

The authorities’ stance on violations during the elections is clear: although ballot rigging is criminally punishable, they chose to treat it as a mere “irregularity”. As a result, people who have been openly involved in ballot rigging were left unpunished and even will have the opportunity to do the same during the upcoming elections.

In any case, the parliamentary elections are crucial. The election observers were not pleased with the previous elections. On numerous occasions, important Western establishments have stated that Georgia’s path to NATO will depend on the fairness of the upcoming elections. Matyas Eorsi restated this position during his visit to Georgia a few days ago:

So when we speak about the parliamentary elections, NATO and MAP is also at stake and I am speaking about this because in my conviction those who put the legitimacy of this election in to question without any substantiated argument in my opinion they put the future and the security of Georgia at risk.

To put it simply, these elections will decide whether Georgia is on the right path — and if this test fails, then prospects of NATO can be forgotten for a few years or so. Therefore, the presence of trust is essential for fair elections — the results must be accepted by everyone involved in the election process. Unfortunately this is not present, which promises to cause unrests in case of disagreement with results.

So here you have it:

The opposition says they will initiate Saakashvili’s impeachment and investigate the violations during the January elections. This sounds like a fantasy, because who would commit violation only later to be held responsible? And who would let some political forces to have such weight in the parliament — wouldn’t that undermine the whole alleged elections violations in the first place?

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