Georgia elections ‘a Russian special op’

The President of Georgia has urged nationwide protests against her own government after it claimed victory in a vote she said was rigged by a Russian ‘special operation’.

President Salome Zurabishvili said she did not recognise the result of the Georgian election. Picture: AFP

The President of Georgia has urged nationwide protests against her own government after it claimed victory in a vote she said was rigged by a Russian “special operation”.

Salome Zourabichvili, the ceremonial head of state, accused the Georgian Dream party of the “total rigging” of parliamentary elections that had been portrayed by the government and opposition as the most important since the Black Sea country achieved independence from Moscow in 1991.

“This was a total rigging, a total robbing of your votes,” Ms Zourabichvili said during a much-anticipated speech at the presidential palace in the capital Tbilisi. “We were witnesses and victims of a Russian special operation. I do not recognise these elections.”

Bidzina Ivanishvili, the reclusive billionaire who has led Georgian Dream since it came to power in 2012, has vowed to ban pro-Western opposition parties after the polls, describing them as a “plague” and a “cancer”.

He has also threatened to impeach Ms Zourabichvili.

Exit polls by Western-based pollsters had predicted no more than 40 per cent for Georgian Dream, while indicating that a loose coalition of opposition forces in favour of moving closer to Europe would gain enough to form the next government. However, the country’s election commission said Georgian Dream had won almost 55 per cent of the vote at elections that European observers said took place in “a climate of hatred and intimidation”.

They listed more than a dozen cases of attacks on either opposition members or their offices.

Ms Zourabichvili, the country’s first female president, was endorsed by Georgian Dream during her own election campaign six years ago. She has since turned against Mr Ivanishvili and his party.

Mr Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, rules Georgia from a futuristic mansion. The heavily guarded house contains a shark tank and a menagerie of other exotic animals. Although he denies supporting the Kremlin, his critics have accused him of dragging the country back into Russia’s orbit with a series of divisive laws cracking down on media freedoms and civil liberties. It is unclear whether he maintains links with officials in Moscow.

“You could easily caricature him as a James Bond villain, but at the same time, that’s selling him short,” said Lincoln Mitchell, a former informal adviser. “It always felt to me like it was a cheap shot from the West not to recognise him for what he was, to underestimate him and his strategic mind.”

There were protests in Tbilisi earlier this year after the government announced a “foreign influence” law similar to legislation that President Vladimir Putin has used to muzzle dissent in Russia.

Georgia’s application to join the EU was halted by Brussels and the EU and the US have cut aid.

Aside from disinformation and electoral fraud tactics, Russian agencies hacked almost the entire structure of the Georgian government between 2017 and 2020 according to a report by Bloomberg.

The Times