Ex-diplomat Zurabishvili elected Georgia’s first woman president
TBILISI: Georgia has elected ruling party candidate Salome Zurabishvili as its first woman president, results showed yesterday, but the opposition claimed fraud and called for supporters to take to the streets.
With 99.9 percent of ballots counted, the French-born exdiplomat had taken 59.61 percent of the vote in Wednesday’s second round of the election.
Her rival Grigol Vashadze, from an alliance of 11 opposition parties led by exiled ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM), was on 40.46 percent.
The election was seen as a test of Georgia’s democratic credentials as the Caucasus nation seeks European Union and Nato membership.
It was also a trial run for more important parliamentary elections in 2020, when the ruling Georgian Dream party is set to face off against a range of opposition parties.
Georgian Dream — the creation of billionaire tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili who many see as the country’s de facto ruler — backed Zurabishvili in the presidential vote. Ivanishvili’s great rival, the flamboyant expresident Saakashvili, claimed ‘mass electoral fraud’ even before official results were released.
“The oligarch has stamped out Georgian democracy and the institutions of elections,” he said on the pro-opposition Rustavi-2 television channel, referring to Ivanishvili.
“I urge Georgians to defend our freedom, democracy and the law. I call on you to start mass peaceful rallies and demand snap parliamentary polls.”
Saakashvili swept to power in 2004 in a mass protest movement known as the Rose Revolution but, after a disastrous 2008 war with Russia, fled the country in 2013 and has since been stripped of his citizenship.
He was sentenced in absentia to six years in prison for abuse of office, charges he rejects as politically motivated. He now lives in the Netherlands.
Tensions increased ahead of the second round as the opposition accused the government of voter intimidation and claimed that ruling party activists had attacked Vashadze campaign staff.
Zurabishvili in turn said she and her children had received death threats through text and voice messages from people affiliated with the UNM.
Rights groups have accused government officials of votebuying on a ‘widespread’ and ‘unprecedented’ scale and of election fraud, including through the alleged printing of fake ID cards.
Opposition supporters will be watching for reports from foreign election monitors, including from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, to see if their claims of voter fraud are supported.
SCE observers were to hold a press conference in Tbilisi later Thursday.
Street protests against the results could shake the small exSoviet republic, which has seen civil wars, mass demonstrations and unrest since gaining its independence in 1991 on the break-up of the Soviet Union. — AFP