Georgians go to the polls today in the second round of local elections. Candidates from the ruling Georgian Dream party face runoff votes for 42 seats on municipal and city councils as well as the mayors of 20 out of 64 municipalities and cities.
Read our election primer: Georgian Dream face challenges in cities as local elections kick off.
The holding of free and fair elections is central to democracy, yet, if elections are not considered free and fair, then polarisation and questions about their legitimacy can divide society. Polling from CRRC Georgia suggests a deep partisan divide in Georgia when it comes to views on the quality of elections in the country. Data CRRC Georgia collected before the 2021 municipal elections for ISFED and after the elections for NDI shows that supporters of the ruling party and opposition were and
Georgian Dream have won a byelection for the Batumi City Council. While the council is now formally hung, a ‘neutral’ candidate is suspected to be a ruling party ally. Georgian Dream’s candidate Ramaz Jincharadze won a convincing victory in Saturday’s vote for a majoritarian council seat in Batumi, Georgia’s second-largest city and the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Adjara. The result will upset plans by opposition groups the United National Movement (UNM) and Lelo to deny the ruling
The opposition appears to have lost their majority on the Batumi City Council after the death of a councillor, allegedly following pressure from the government. Nugzar Putkaradze died last Thursday in what his sister, who also sits on the city council, has said was a diabetic attack. The opposition United National Movement (UNM) have claimed that his blood sugar levels skyrocketed leading to his death after repeated attempts by people connected to the ruling party to make him defect. Putkara
International and local election observers often note violations of the secrecy of the ballot in Georgia, and the 2021 local elections were no exception. According to a recent study, a plurality of people think such violations could take place in Georgia, and some have heard of such cases in the past year. On the survey on election-related attitudes carried out by CRRC Georgia for ISFED, respondents were asked about a hypothetical country where a citizen’s vote was somehow revealed to a neig
