Amid Uncertainty Over Election Results, Georgians Look To The West

TBILISI -- As Georgia reckons with its shock election results, all eyes are turning to the West to see if the United States and Europe will back up the opposition's claims that the election was stolen.

The United States and the European Union have so far responded relatively cautiously to the outcome of the elections, in which the ruling Georgian Dream took about 54 percent of the vote, and the four cooperating opposition forces, about 38 percent.

Soon after the results were announced late in the evening of October 26, the opposition parties declared that the elections had been stolen, citing their inconsistency with what opposition-friendly exit polls had indicated --a solid Georgian Dream defeat.

The opposition was backed up the following evening by Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, whose position is technically a figurehead one but who has emerged as the critical supporter and powerbroker among the opposition groups. She said the results were a "total falsification" and even the result of a "Russian special operation."

Cautious Response

But voices from the West have been much more measured.

The election observation missions identified widespread violations in the vote, including intimidation of voters, ballot-box stuffing, and double voting. But they declined to pass judgment on the legitimacy of the elections.

The statement from the European Union called on the Georgian authorities to investigate the irregularities, and the U.S. State Department noted pointedly that "international observers have not declared the result to be free and fair," but both stopped short of declaring the elections illegitimate.

That caution disappointed many Georgian opposition leaders and their supporters, who look to the United States and Europe for backing.

"This is not the time for compromises or mild words," Nika Gvaramia, one of the leaders of the opposition Coalition for Change bloc, told the United Kingdom's Financial Times. "It's not about diplomacy, it's about geopolitics."

"The West must decide: Either abandon the Georgian people or stand firmly by them and refuse to recognize the elections. There's no middle ground," wrote Mariam Geguchadze, one of the founders of the activist Shame Movement, on X.

Tens of thousands of Georgians came out to a demonstration on the evening of October 28, which Zurabishvili had called. She had not called it a protest but rather a "symbolic act to show the world our will." Participants carried signs reading: "International society don't leave us alone."

At the rally, opposition parties demanded that new elections be held "under international administration," said Giorgi Vashadze, head of the Strategy Aghmeshenebeli party. There were several factors for the muted international reaction, analysts say.

The Orban Factor

The EU reaction will be constrained by the close relationship between nationalist-conservative Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Georgian Dream. Orban congratulated the ruling party on its victory even before results had been announced, and he traveled to Tbilisi on October 28 to meet with senior leaders; at a press conference, he said the party's victory was "indisputable."

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze (left) and visiting Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban arrive for a joint briefing in Tbilisi on October 29.

"EU action will be undermined by Orban," Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, told RFE/RL. "Also, you don't want to sever the whole relationship with a prospective accession country."

Another factor is the complex nature of the alleged fraud, and questions about whether it accounted for all of Georgian Dream's substantial margin of victory.

A Georgian observer mission, My Vote, said it had found evidence of a "large scheme" by Georgian Dream to rig the elections. It allegedly involved various procedures to weaken the verification process, allowing an organized "carousel" of multiple voting to take place. On October 28, the group called on election authorities to annul votes in precincts with more than 300,000 voters total and said that number would rise as more evidence was gathered.

Given the wide margin of victory -- around 335,000 votes -- there may be an inclination to accept the results, if not the process.

"Georgian Dream's margin of victory is important, because serious international engagement is arduous and potentially costly. If the EU gets deeply involved, it risks further polarization and conflict. Some might think that it is not worth the effort, given how close the race could have been even with clean elections," Sonja Schiffers, director of the Tbilisi office of the German-based Heinrich Boll Foundation, said. "Some may be thinking, 'what's the point?'"

Still, she said, "after the magnitude of violations has sunk in with the internationals, if protests continue, and after some coordination, there could be a stronger reaction. At this point, insisting on an independent international mission to investigate the violations seems the best option for the EU and its pro-democratic member states."

Blaming The Opposition

Some Georgians, meanwhile, were looking inward to find answers for the election result. After voting showed that the ethnic Armenian- and Azerbaijani-populated areas of southern Georgia had voted in overwhelming numbers for Georgian Dream, there was a social media backlash.

But others argued that it was in part the opposition's own fault for neglecting those regions. "This latest election was worse than ever: no opposition leaders visited the region, no real campaign appeared in local media, and only a few posters went up days before election day," Olesya Vartanyan, a Tbilisi-based analyst with family in that region, wrote on X. "Meanwhile, [Georgian Dream] mobilized its entire civil and security networks intensively to secure votes."

The director of the Tbilisi International Film Festival, Gaga Chkheidze, wrote a Facebook post describing his experience as an election observer in a village in central Georgia. The day passed calmly, with only minor violations that were corrected, and when the results came out, he saw that Georgian Dream had won 58 percent in his precinct.

He chalked it up to the party's cajoling of "apathetic" voters, whom the party "asked, threatened, promised, bribed, intimidated," he wrote. "It became very obvious that [Georgian] Dream did a great job in advance in this village, and probably did so in all villages around Georgia. And the results confirmed it."