By Felix Light and Lucy Papachristou
TBILISI (Reuters) -Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party received more than 54% of the vote in the country’s parliamentary election on Saturday, the electoral commission said on Sunday, though the result was disputed by opposition parties.
The result, with more than 99% of precincts counted, is a blow to pro-Western Georgians who had cast the election as a choice between a ruling party that has deepened ties with Russia and an opposition aiming to fast-track integration with the European Union.
ISFED, a Georgian election monitoring group, said it had registered violations including ballot-stuffing, bribery and voter intimidation that could have had an impact on the results.
It said it had not seen significant violations in the counting of votes, most of which were tallied electronically.
The electoral commission and Georgian Dream party did not respond immediately to requests for comment on the allegations, but on Saturday both hailed a free and fair election. Georgian Dream is expected to comment on the matter later on Sunday.
The country’s four main opposition parties said they do not recognise the results, with one opposition leader calling the results “a constitutional coup”. They cited two exit polls that showed the opposition winning a majority of seats in parliament.
But Georgian Dream’s reclusive billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had campaigned heavily on keeping Georgia out of the war in Ukraine, claimed success on Saturday night after his party’s strongest performance since 2012.
Electoral commission data showed it winning by huge margins of up to 90% in some rural areas, though it underperformed in bigger cities.
“It is a rare case in the world that the same party achieves such success in such a difficult situation – this is a good indicator of the talent of the Georgian people,” Ivanishvili told cheering supporters on Saturday night.
EU MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION IN FOCUS
Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream says it wants Georgia to join the European Union, though Brussels says the country’s membership application is frozen over what it says is Georgian Dream’s authoritarian tendencies.
Georgian Dream had pushed through a law on “foreign agents” and another curbing LGBT rights. Both drew strong criticism from Western countries but were praised by some Russian officials.
Georgia had been one of the most pro-Western countries to emerge from the Soviet Union, with polls showing many Georgians disliking Russia for its support of two breakaway regions.
The two countries fought a brief war over the rebel province of South Ossetia in 2008, in which Georgia was defeated.
The election result represents a setback to the EU’s expansion plans, though the bloc may struggle to come up with a unified response.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban congratulated the Georgian Dream party on Saturday before the results were officially announced while the EU’s foreign policy arm said it could not comment until election monitors had provided their findings.
An EU official told Reuters there was “a sense of disappointment” over the opposition’s performance but Brussels was primarily concerned about a contested result leading to a standoff.
One local monitoring organisation called for the results to be annulled, based on reports of voter intimidation and vote buying, but it did not immediately provide evidence of large-scale falsification.
Last week Moldova voted narrowly to approve its European Union accession in a vote that Moldovan officials said was marred by Russian interference.
(Reporting by Felix Light and Lucy PapachristouEditing by David Goodman)
