Georgia’s prime minister has hailed a “landslide” election result, rejecting allegations of vote-rigging and violence.
“Irregularities happen everywhere, in every country,” Irakli Kobakhidze of the Georgian Dream party told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in an exclusive interview.
Official preliminary results from Georgia’s election commission gave the ruling Georgian Dream an outright majority of 54%, despite exit polls for opposition TV channels suggesting four opposition parties had won.
Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has condemned the “total falsification” of the vote and called for opposition supporters to rally outside parliament on Monday.
Election observers in this South Caucasus state bordering Russia have complained of an “uneven playing field” in the election, suggesting the scale of vote violations may have affected the result.
The US and European Union have backed the monitors’ calls for an independent investigation. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Georgia’s leaders to “respect the rule of law, repeal legislation that undermines fundamental freedoms, and address deficiencies in the electoral process together”.
However, the prime minister insisted that out of 3,111 polling stations, there had been incidents in “just a couple of precincts” but that in all the others “the environment was completely peaceful”.
Georgian Dream, known as GD, has become increasingly authoritarian, recently passing Russian-style laws targeting media and non-government groups who receive foreign funding, and the LGBT community.
The European Union has responded by freezing Georgia’s bid to join the EU, accusing it of “democratic backsliding”. Tbilisi was awarded candidate status only last December and an estimated 80% of Georgians want to be part of the 27-country union.
Even before the results came out, one EU leader, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, congratulated Georgian Dream on securing a fourth term and is due to travel to Georgia on Monday.
The ruling party says it is keen to kickstart talks on reviving its EU bid, but the sight of Orban arriving in Tbilisi two days after a contested election is unlikely to go down well in Brussels. Orban is seen as Russia’s closest ally in the EU, and the European Parliament has denounced his government as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”.
