By Howie Hawkins

The officially announced results of the parliamentary election in the country of Georgia yesterday are in dispute. The ruling Georgia Dream party declared victory, while the four major opposition parties called the election stolen.

With more than 99% of precincts counted, official results from the Central Election Commission (CEC) have the ruling Georgian Dream with a 54.2% majority. The combined total of opposition parties that passed the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation is 37.4%.

Exit polling told a different story. Two Western polling companies that we in America are familiar with had similar results. Edison Research had Georgia Dream (GD) receiving 40.9%. HarrisX had GD at 42%, both indicating strong wins for the pro-European opposition. But the exit poll commissioned by pro-GD Imedi TV and conducted by Gorbi had GD with a comfortable 56.1% majority.

One official election observer I spoke to said, “It was a fix.” I will meet with this person in the next day or two and will quote him in future dispatches if this person can be quoted at this time given their official election observer role.

Not surprisingly, Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban congratulated GD and its multi-billionaire oligarch leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, on the basis of the Gorbi exit poll before any vote totals had been reported.

But many do not accept the legitimacy of the reported election results.

Georgia’s independent President, Salome Zurabishvili, said the results reported by the CEC were falsified by GD. The CEC is widely regarded as controlled by GD appointees. At a news conference surrounded by leaders of opposition political parties, Zurabishvili said the election was a “total fraud” and a “total robbery” of votes. She said the elections were “Russian” in nature.

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), which closely monitored election, concluded that the results may not reflect the will of the Georgian people, citing reports of voter intimidation, vote buying, confiscation of ID cards, and collection and processing of personal data.

The anti-corruption organization Transparency International rejected the official results.

The International Election Observation Mission issued its Preliminary Findings and Conclusions on the October 26 Parliamentary elections, saying that elections “unfolded amid entrenched polarization in an environment marred by concerns over recently adopted legislation, its impact on fundamental freedoms and civil society.” While “contestants could generally campaign freely “reports of pressure on voters, particularly on public sector employees, remained widespread in the campaign.

International Election Observation Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Eurpe (OSCE) reported pressure on voters, particularly on public sector employees, including extensive tracking of voters on election day fight “raised concerns about the ability of some voters to cast their vote without fear of retribution.”

The European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations (ENEMO) gave a briefing in which it reported “Critical violations included violence against opposition members, voter intimidation, smear campaigns targeting observers, and extensive misuse of administrative resources. Restrictive enforcement of campaign regulations limited competition, exerted significant pressure on civil society and the media, and reduced space for government criticism….The cumulative impact of these observed issues significantly compromised the democratic integrity of the election process.”

The head of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, Nona Kurdovanidze, held a briefing to say the elections were held “against a background of significant violations, predominantly in an unfair, violent and tense environment”. Among the many violations she listed were multiple voting by individuals, obstructing election monitors, violations of ballot secrecy, intimidating GD cameras monitoring verification machine and voting booths, identification of voters outside of polling stations party representatives, and obstructing journalists.

One number no one is disputing is the turnout, which was reported to be 58.9%.

The pro-European parties have said they will not accept the seats they won in parliament. They are meeting as I write to decide their next course of action.

Political Crisis

A political crisis is likely to ensue from this disputed election. In the last parliamentary election in 2020, the opposition said the Georgia Dream party had fixed the election and it took five months of negotiations mediated by the EU before a government could be formed.

This time, however, the stakes are higher. The opposition called it a Europe vs. Russia election and they want to ally with Europe. The ruling Georgia Dream party accused the pro-European opposition of being Western proxies trying to subvert the traditional conservative Orthodox Christian values of Georgian society and drag Georgia into Russo-Ukranian war on Ukraine’s side.

In its election campaign, Georgia Dream promised if elected to ban the pro-European parties, cut off foreign funding for civil society organizations like labor unions and environmental campaigns, and expand discrimination against LGBTQ people. But even if the 54% it won holds, it is well short of the two-thirds majority it would need to pass such legislation over the veto of the president, who for now is an independent allied with the opposition.

But the opposition is still very concerned, especially for the powers the Georgian state was given to repress civic, academic, and political dissent with the passage of the foreign agents registration law in May. They called it the Russia law because it is modeled after similar legislation that Putin has used to criminalize and suppress anti-war and political dissent in Russia.

Foreign Intervention

For a comprehensive discussion of the authoritarian consequences of the foreign agents law among five Georgian leftists, see this interview published jointly by Posle, a publication of exiled Russian socialists, and by Tempest, an American socialist publication: “Resisting authoritarianism in the Caucasus: Interview with Georgians about their struggle to defend democracy,” June 7, 2024.

A central point of their analysis is that Georgia Dream is turning to authoritarian repression because popular environmental campaigns have been disrupting a major hydoelectic dam and a manganese mine. Projects like these are key to Georgia’s role as an exploited neocolonial source and transit hub for raw materials for capitalist investors from the U.S., EU, China, Turkey, and Russia alike. The ancient villages and farms of ordinary Georgians are slated to become sacrifice zones imposed by the Georgian state on behalf of global capitalism. I will be meeting with one of these Georgian leftists, Ia Eradze, tomorrow and with another one, Lela Rekhviashvili, in Germany next month.

The role that Georgia plays in the world economy explains why Russia and the West have been trying to influence the Georgian election. The Russian influence is obvious in the anti-liberal, anti-LGBTQ, pro Orthodox Christian messaging. Many believe Russian money is paying for votes and election meddling. The West withdrew Georgia’s EU candidate status when the foreign agents law passed. Georgia Dream claims the West is trying to overthrow its rule in a “color revolution,” the Russian counter-revolutionary term for dismissing any popular uprising as the work of Western outside agitators. It is like the Southern Dixiecrats in the 1950s and 1960s who claimed that the Black civil rights movement to end voting disenfranchisement, segregation, and discrimination was only the work of outside “Communist” agitators.

The reality of popular movements in Georgia is different. The foreign agents law is aimed at far more than NGOs funded by Western sources. It is also aimed at academic freedom and popular movements. Lela Rekhviashvili, who has written one book on the popular campaign against a mega-dam in Western Georgia and is working on another, emphasizes that this anti-dam movement is largely funded by remittances from Georgian migrant laborers in Western Europe. One reason many Georgians want their country to become an EU member is so migrant laborers can readily work in Western Europe and send remittances back to impoverished families back home. See Lela Rekhviashvili, Luka Nakhutsrishvili, Konstantine Eristavi, Alexandra Aroshvili, and Ia Eradze, “There’s more at stake in the fight against the Foreign Agents Law than liberal NGOs: Why the left should show solidarity with the protests in Georgia,” LeftEast, May 28, 2024.

Party and Movement in the Georgian Greens

Today I meet with Nato Kirvalidze, who I had spoken with online in June in a Zoom meeting of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and then a Greens Socialist Notes podcast. It was nice to meet in person. She took me on a walk with her dog in a park by a lake on the edge of Tblisi followed by a Georgian brunch of tomato and cucumber salad with a pizza-shaped cheese-filled pastry called Khachapuri.

Nato is an environmental scientist and one of the original Greens in Georgia from the late 1980 and early 1990s. She is thankfully assisting and guiding me on my visit in Georgia. She was the Greens Party of Georgia representative to the European Green Party. She explained how the original Greens Party had three sections within one organization: the Greens Movement that focused on education and action in civil society, the research arm that did scientific and policy studies, and the Greens Party that focused on electoral and legislative politics. But legislation in the mid 1990s required the legal separation of these organizations. Although the three branches of the Green movement tried to continue coordinating informally, they drifted apart.

The Greens Party was weakened because it was not able to draw directly on the Greens Movement activists. What had been a party of 6,000 dues-paying members with 11 members of parliament in the early 1990s is today a party of 3,000 nominal members who do not support the party with dues and have no parliamentary representation. The party was also undoubtedly hurt when its early leader, Zurab Zhvania, left the party in the 1995 parliamentary election to form another party with Eduard Shevardnadze, as I recounted in my previous dispatches. Many Greens followed Zhvania out of the party, including Nino Chkhobadze, a co-founder of the Greens Movement, who due to Zhvania’s influence, became Georgia’s environmental minister from 1995 until 2004 when she resigned in opposition to an environmentally and geopolitically controversial oil pipeline.

Nato has set up a meeting for me with Nino tomorrow. Nino remains active in the Greens Movement, whose website indicates the movement remains an active popular organization. It is affiliated with Friends of the Earth International. The Greens Party of Georgia is affiliated with the European Green Party (EGP), but the website link listed on their affiliation page with the EGP is a dead link.

Later in the week, we will be meeting with activists in the new, younger Green Party that has a more egalitarian feminist, pro-LGBTQ, and economic and environmental justice orientation than the old Green Party. We will travel to the sites of the anti-mining and anti-mega dam battles. And we will monitor and perhaps witness any mass marches and demonstrations concerning the election results.

Howie Hawkins 2020

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