The Georgian Parliament has passed amendments to the election code that will prevent Georgians living abroad from voting in elections unless they travel back to the country to do so.
The amendments, initiated in November by the ruling Georgian Dream party and its allies, were approved with the third and final hearing on Wednesday by a vote of 79 to 11. Unlike past practice, polling stations will no longer be opened abroad for parliamentary elections, and voting will take place only within the country’s borders, similar to procedures for municipal elections.
The now-adopted amendments have become a subject of broad public debate within Georgian society, both among those living in the country and Georgians residing abroad. Critics have repeatedly accused the ruling party of attempting to strip citizens living abroad of their right to vote.
The ruling party itself denied this intention and sought to downplay the possible consequences of the new legislation, with Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili noting that ‘nothing is changing regarding the voting rights of citizens abroad’.
‘As before, every citizen of Georgia will have full rights and the opportunity to vote in elections; the only condition is coming to the homeland once every four years to cast their vote in Georgia’, he said at a briefing in parliament in November.
Defending the amendments, Papuashvili framed them as a measure against ‘external interference’ in Georgian elections, claiming that the 2024 parliamentary elections — whose disputed results kept Georgian Dream in power — ‘clearly showed how open and brutal informational and political pressure on voters from abroad can be’.
The authorities also sought to frame the legislation as an attempt to place Georgian emigrants on equal footing, with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze stating that Georgians living in Russia have been unable to vote from there since 2008 — following the August war and the suspension of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
‘Can it be that one half has one privilege and the other half has a different privilege? Have you heard anyone express concern about that? This is because their reasoning is entirely subjective and not based on real arguments’, Kobakhidze said.
According to him, another aim of the amendments is to ensure an ‘informed choice’, noting that for this it is important ‘to come to the country even for a single day and see [...] what is happening in the country’.
However, critics have rejected the ruling party’s justification.
The Social Justice Center (SJC) described the amendments as a tool to ‘effectively abolish’ the ability of Georgians living abroad to exercise their ‘active right to vote’. Responding to Georgian Dream’s claims of external interference, the SJC said such assertions by the party are ‘unsubstantiated and not based on tangible empirical arguments or data’.
According to the organisation, by imposing an obligation to return to Georgia in order to vote, the ruling party disregards the hardships of Georgian emigrants, including immigration procedures and employment conditions, which often prevent them from returning home ‘even in times of [personal] tragedies’.
The SJC also rejected the authorities’ claims about ensuring an informed choice, pointing to emigrants’ active involvement in Georgia’s social and economic life — including through substantial remittances — as well as their active mobilisation during elections and their engagement in political and social activism in their homeland.
Condemning the ruling party’s amendments, the Georgian diaspora movement Qarebi (Winds) described them as yet another demonstration of ‘illegitimate government’s plan to undermine Georgia’s Constitution’.
‘Emigrants are an important part of Georgian society and the economy, and participation in elections is not a privilege but our constitutional right’, the movement said in a Facebook post published in November.
According to the official results of the 2024 parliamentary elections, Georgian Dream received only 13.5% of the vote in polling stations opened abroad. An overwhelming majority of ballots went to the opposition.
According to official results, with 67 polling stations opened across 42 countries, over 34,000 people cast their ballots at the time — far fewer than the 95,910 registered voters abroad and well below the total number of Georgian emigrants around the world. Estimates of the georgian diaspora range from several hundred thousand to over a million, with a significant amount residing in Russia and large communities in EU countries, as well as the US.
Ruling party representatives have cited the overseas turnout in 2024 as proof that the emigrant vote is not large enough to pose a threat to Georgian Dream. However, critics argued during the 2024 vote that the authorities failed to open enough polling stations abroad, limiting many emigrants’ ability to vote near their place of residence.
The amendments to the election code were introduced by Georgian Dream amid a series of recently adopted restrictive legislations targeting civil society, independent media, the political opposition, and street protests.
Georgian Dream has repeatedly claimed that the new bills are necessary to fight the ‘influence of external powers’. Nonetheless, critics of the ruling party have emphasised that these changes aim to undermine freedoms in an already fragile democracy.
OC Media
