According to her lawyer, the President of Georgia, breaking with the government of this small Caucasian country, asked the Constitutional Court on Tuesday, November 19, to annul the legislative elections won by the ruling party, which the opposition considers rigged. . The president, Salomé Zourabichvili, justified her initiative by “widespread violations of the universal character of the vote and the secrecy of the ballot” which was held on October 26, said Eka Beselia, the lawyer representing the pro-Western leader.
The Electoral Commission confirmed on Saturday the victory of the Georgian Dream (53.93%) which secures it 89 of the 150 seats in Parliament. This party – accused by its detractors of pro-Russian authoritarian drift and of wanting to distance Georgia from the European Union – came ahead of an alliance of pro-Western opposition parties (37.79%).
But the opposition cried fraud and Western chancelleries and the European Union called for investigations into these allegations of irregularities. Membership in the EU, like that in NATO, are objectives enshrined in the Georgian Constitution. The European Union had made these legislative elections a test in the perspective of this accession.
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Clashes between demonstrators and police
President Zurabichvili also contested these results. After their announcement, she denounced a sophisticated system of fraud following a “Russian methodology”but then refused to respond to a summons from the prosecution to detail these accusations which Moscow refutes.
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The opposition refuses to enter Parliament which is due to hold its first session on Monday in its new political composition. The president warned that she would not sign the decree to convene him, but the Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, announced that he would ignore it.
The officialization of the result on Saturday led to demonstrations by citizens protesting against what they consider to be a stolen vote. On Tuesday morning, clashes broke out when the police began to evacuate the demonstrators who were blocking one of the main streets of the capital and a camp set up near Tbilisi University, according to local television. According to the leader of the opposition Akhali party, Nika Gvaramia, several members “of his party’s political council were beaten and arrested”.
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