In the capital city of Tbilisi, Georgia, thousands of people gathered outside the parliament building on Monday, waving EU flags and protesting the results of the country’s parliamentary election over the weekend.
According to the official count, the conservative ruling party, Georgian Dream, which has been in power the past 12 years, won 54% of the vote.
But the opposition in Georgia is rejecting these results, pointing to scores of irregularities — and some fear that this discord could plunge the country into a political crisis.
Iulian Bulai, the head of the election observation delegation from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, spoke to the press on Sunday.
“The presence of cameras of the ruling party in the polling stations and people in front of polling stations, tracking and possibly controlling voters, led to a widespread climate of pressure and party-organized intimidation, and a feeling of ‘big brother is watching you’ as one of our observers depicted it.”
Instances of this kind of surveillance and intimidation were reported across Georgia.
One video that has made the rounds on Georgian social media shows a group of men barging into a voting precinct and blatantly stuffing dozens of ballots into a ballot box.
Although incidences like this weren’t widespread, for many Georgians, this case was indicative of the entire election.
Olesya Vartanyan, a South Caucasus security and conflict expert based in Tbilisi, volunteered as an observer during the election.
“At the polling station in the street, you see a group of men in black clothes, you know, who are standing there, and then some of them have a list — you can see how they are basically crossing the names of the people who come.”
Those who didn’t show up would get a call from Georgian Dream — which she saw them do out in the open.
Vartanyan said that people who depend on the state budget — government workers and pensions — were pressured to vote for them.
“One woman who was in, she said [she was] 92, you know, quite old, and then, there was another man who was, he had problems with walking, we had a quick chat, and both of them said they were afraid to lose their subsidies.”
On Sunday, Georgia’s President Salome Zourabichvili said that the election was stolen.
She also alleged that Russia was involved, calling it a “Russian special operation,” and a new form of “hybrid warfare” waged against Georgia.
In an interview on Monday with Deutsche Welle, Zourabichvili said that the Georgian people will protest because “They are the ones that have seen their votes being stolen, they are the ones that are driven by force into a regime that will be more like Russia rather than like a European democratic country.”
In the spring, Georgian Dream passed two controversial laws through parliament.
The first, a Russian-style “foreign agent” law, which is used to target nongovernmental organizations and Georgian civil society, and another law that curbs LGBTQ rights in Georgia.
Steve Swerdlow is a human rights lawyer and a professor at the University of Southern California.
“It’s those two laws, in particular, that have really shined the light on how dangerous this party is for long-term democracy in Georgia.”
Swerdlow said that if Georgian Dream remains in power, more of these kinds of laws will pass through parliament.
“I think we’ll continue to see Georgia going down a repressive path where civil society organizations are closed or hounded out of the country — where many young people, more liberally minded, who don’t want to see a Russia-style evolution of their society — could leave Georgia.”
Recent polls show that a majority of Georgians want the country to join the European Union and NATO.
Georgian Dream has said that it also wants further integration with Europe, however, in recent years, its leaders’ messages have been increasingly anti-Western.
“I think the statements that are being mostly delivered by Georgian Dream are surrogates for Russia. Which is saying, ‘The war will come to us, beware, the West are warmongers.’ It’s a mix of conspiracy theories and anti-Western rhetoric.”
Vartanyan, the security expert, said that Georgian Dream will continue to grasp onto power despite all the accusations of falsifying the election.
“It will be like living in a parallel universe, because you basically have the people who don’t want to see you in power, but at the same time, you will pretend like you are there. I mean, for how long can you proceed like this?”
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