Renewed calls for repeat vote in Georgia after critical OSCE observation report

There have been renewed calls for new parliamentary elections to be held in Georgia after a key international observer group released a highly critical final report on the vote.

On Friday evening, the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) released their long awaited final report into Georgia’s  26 October parliamentary elections.

The report stated that ‘frequent compromises in vote secrecy and several procedural inconsistencies’ had ‘negatively impacted public trust in the process’.

The report said election day was ‘marked by a tense atmosphere and widespread intimidation of voters, as well as of citizen observers’.

‘Allegations of ruling-party affiliation at all levels [of the Central Election Commission] further eroded public trust’, the report said.

‘Reports of intimidation, coercion, inducement, and pressure on voters, especially public sector employees and the economically vulnerable persisted, raising concerns about the ability of some voters to freely form their opinions and cast their votes without fear of retribution’, it said.

This was exacerbated, the report suggested, by statements from the ruling party vowing to outlaw opposition parties, ‘contrary to the principle of democratic pluralism’.

The report detailed the allegations made by opposition groups and local observers of a campaign of widespread fraud.  It said the dismissal of these complaints by the Central Election Commission and the courts ‘undermined the right to due process, failed to provide an effective remedy, and did not comprehensively address widespread concerns about the integrity of election results’.

Georgia’s four main opposition groups, Strong Georgia, Unity — National Movement, the Coalition for Change, and For Georgia published a joint statement calling the OSCE/ODIHR’s assessment ‘historically the most negative conclusion’ the organisation has ever written on elections in Georgia.

‘The conclusion and set of recommendations published today by the OSCE/ODIHR confirmed the illegitimacy of the election results, which is the basis for re-elections’, their statement read.

They said the report provided ‘a legal and logical basis for fulfilling the demands of the majority of society and the pro-Western, democratic opposition and calling new elections’.

The three largest local groups to observe October’s elections, ISFED, My Vote, and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association (GYLA), likewise stated the report provides ‘another basis for holding new elections in Georgia’.

‘The report is extremely critical and details the complex of violations that were revealed during the parliamentary elections’, they said.

After meeting with opposition and civil society groups on Saturday, President Salome Zourabichvili reiterated calls for new elections to be announced ‘very quickly’. She called for increased pressure  from ‘within and without’ Georgia to force Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili to accept this demand. She also announced she would attend Sunday’s demonstration in front of Parliament.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide responded to the report on Saturday stating it confirmed their ‘serious concerns’ over the elections, echoing a similar statement from the Swedish Foreign Ministry the previous evening.

Despite the highly critical nature of the report, members of the ruling Georgian Dream Party and pro-government media have attempted to frame it as positively assessing the elections.

In a press briefing on Friday evening, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said the report confirmed the elections were ‘free and competitive’, terms not used in the report to describe the vote.

He also said that the extensive list of recommendations provided by the report showed a ‘readiness to cooperate with the elected authorities of Georgia to further improve the electoral environment and procedures’.

Similarly, the Speaker of the Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, said on Saturday that following the report’s release, ‘all damaging speculation about the integrity of the elections should end’.

‘It is also time to stop the attacks from abroad on Georgian democracy and recognise the will of the Georgian people, which was expressed in the only legitimate way, through the elections’, he said.