TBILISI -- Georgia's opposition parties say last month's parliamentary elections were rigged, have refused to accept the results or take their seats in parliament, and are demanding the results be annulled. But they have been slow to present a plan for how to achieve that goal.
The ruling Georgian Dream party claimed a commanding victory in the October 26 elections, taking 54 percent of votes compared to 38 percent for the four cooperating opposition forces. And in the days that have followed, there have been less urgency and mobilization from the opposition parties than many of their supporters had hoped for.
On October 30, opposition parties called for supporters to take to the streets in protest and said they would present their action plan then. But the demonstration they called was for four days later, nine days after the vote. Opposition leaders explained they were proceeding deliberately but decisively.
"I understand many people are frustrated. Everybody wants to have immediate actions," Giorgi Vashadze, head of the Strategy Aghmashenebeli party, told RFE/RL just after the press conference calling for the protest. "But we need to prepare these actions. Sometimes it's better to be ready for something and start later than to start something and then to have chaos."
Three-Phase Plan
But the vague plan the opposition parties ultimately presented at the November 4 rally left many of their supporters unimpressed. Party leaders described it in three phases: Inform Georgians about evidence of election fraud, convince other countries not to recognize the results, and hold protests. It did not differ substantially from what they had been saying over the previous days.
Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili (center), surrounded by opposition leaders, speaks to the media in Tbilisi on October 27, a day after the parliamentary elections.
"We needed a plan and they said that today they will announce a plan and they came today and did not announce anything," one twentysomething woman, who declined to be identified, said at the end of the protest. "So that's frustrating."
She blamed the relatively anemic turnout at the protest on the lack of direction from the joint opposition. "I think people just lost hope that anything will change with this team," she said.
Key to the opposition's case that the elections should be annulled are the allegations of a systematic attempt to rig the vote. While the reports of violations of election law have been widespread -- including claims of vote-buying, multiple voting, and a failure to keep ballots secret -- it has been difficult to demonstrate that what happened this year amounted to a centrally organized effort at fraud, rather than the local-level violations that are common in every Georgian election.
"In the last week, the opposition's whole case has been built on whether or not they can prove widespread fraud," said John DiPirro, the Georgia Program Director at the International Republican Institute, at a panel discussion hosted by the German Marshall Fund. The reported violations are numerous "but that burden of proof being met at a national, widespread scale is much more difficult for the opposition."
Call For EU Help
Opposition leaders have been seeking some sort of international mission, perhaps from the European Union, to investigate the allegations of vote fraud.
But such a mission would require the permission of the Georgian Dream-led government, which is unlikely to be granted unless Western powers are able to provide the party with a strong incentive.
"You've got a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation where the West is unwilling to take these steps without sufficient evidence, and the opposition can not sufficiently acquire that evidence unless the West applies pressure" on Georgian Dream to allow an international assessment, DiPirro said.
EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell
Opposition leaders have been meeting with foreign diplomats, but Western officials have been tightlipped about potential next steps. Asked about a potential EU assessment mission, the EU delegation in Tbilisi referred RFE/RL to an October 30 statement by Josep Borrell, the bloc's foreign policy chief.
"It is important to remark that independent observers have not declared the elections to be free and fair. Nor the contrary," Borrell said. "So we are in a zone that requires investigation in order to clarify what has happened, which is the scope of the irregularities and how this has been affecting the results."
"It's an issue on which Brussels isn't quite sure how to react," reported RFE/RL's Europe Editor Rikard Jozwiak.
There have been some signs of fracture within the main opposition forces: One of the four parties, For Georgia, did not participate in the November 4 protest and has seemingly distanced itself from the other three, who continue to coordinate.
The leader of For Georgia, Giorgi Gakharia, has been promoting his own parallel plan to investigate allegations of voting irregularities. He wants the machines that registered voters at their precincts to be handed over to a "neutral, objective platform" so that it can be verified that individuals voted when and where the machines say they did.
Moving On...
Meanwhile, Georgian Dream leaders and their supporters are trying to put the elections behind them.
Shalva Papuashvili, the speaker of parliament, compared the situation to that following the 2020 parliamentary elections, in which the opposition also refused to accept the results, held protests that didn't gain traction, and only took their seats in parliament after the European Union painstakingly brokered a deal between them and Georgian Dream.
"Now this is repeated as a farce. The same actors, the same stage director," Papuashvili said.
Ahead of the November 4 protest, several of the opposition party leaders marched through the city to the protest site. One bystander, watching the march from outside her opticians' shop, was unimpressed.
"I think there was something," she said, referring to election violations. (She asked not to be named.) "But I am sure that the absolute majority of people here support the government."
She blamed the West for propping up the opposition parties. "Can't America and the West understand that this opposition will never win? They are not popular, you know," she said.
"I don't like when other countries stick their noses into my country and tell us to do this or that. We'll figure it out somehow."