By Felix Light and Lucy Papachristou
TBILISI (Reuters) – Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party received more than 54% of the vote in a parliamentary election on Saturday, with more than 99% of precincts counted, the electoral commission said on Sunday.
The results is a blow to pro-Western Georgians, who had cast the election as a choice between a ruling party that has deepened ties with Russia, and an opposition that had hoped to fast-track integration with the European Union.
Several local and international monitoring organisations, including the Organisation for Scurity and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), are expected to comment on the results on Sunday.
Opposition parties said on Saturday that they do not recognise the results, with one opposition leader calling the results “a constitutional coup”.
But Georgian Dream’s reclusive billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had campaigned heavily on keeping Georgia out of the war in Ukraine, claimed success on Saturday night, with his party putting in its strongest performance since 2012 on the back of huge margins of up to 90% in some rural areas.
“It is a rare case in the world that the same party achieves such success in such a difficult situation – this is a good indicator of the talent of the Georgian people,” Ivanishvili told cheering supporters on Saturday night.
Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream says it wants Georgia to join the European Union, though Brussels says the country’s membership application is frozen over what it says is Georgian Dream’s authoritarian tendencies.
One local monitoring organisation called for the results to be annulled, based on reports of voter intimidation and vote buying, but it did not immediately provide evidence of large-scale falsification.
Last week Moldova voted narrowly to approve its European Union accession in a vote that Moldovan officials said was marred by Russian interference.