Georgia: Ruling Party Landslide Win

The BBC reports that as predicted by initial returns and exit polls, the ruling United National Movement party of the Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has won a landslide victory in this week’s parliamentary election. The party took 59.5 percent of the vote with the main opposition party receiving 17.7 percent. Now it remains to be seen what the immediate post-election situation brings with it, but it doesn’t appear as though much will happen.

Mr Saakashvili, seeking to avoid a repeat of the street battles that preceded those elections, said he would work with his opponents.

“We will not undertake any changes without consultations with the whole political spectrum and without the participation of the opposition,” he said on Thursday.

The election result will give Mr Saakashvili’s United National Movement about 120 of parliament’s 150 seats - a constitutional majority.

The main United Opposition bloc will be in second place, and the Christian Democrats and the Labour Party also won enough votes to take seats in parliament.

The size of Mr Saakashvili’s victory will give him great power to shape Georgia’s future, says the BBC’s Matthew Collin in Tbilisi.

He will now feel he can press ahead with his radical reformist agenda, with guaranteed support from a parliament dominated by his party.

The president is also hoping to take Georgia closer to the West, and to join Nato.

Meanwhile, the Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe (OSCE)’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has issued its preliminary statement on the election and seems to be more vague than its every been in this part of the world. Interestingly, they have avoided using the same kind of phrases which attracted much criticism after the January and February presidential elections in Georgia and Armenia.

Political stakeholders in Georgia made efforts to conduct yesterday’s parliamentary elections in line with international standards, but a number of problems were identified which made their implementation uneven and incomplete, the International Election Observation Mission said in a preliminary statement released today.

The observers noted that voters were offered a wide array of choices to select their representatives. The legal framework was generally conducive to the conduct of democratic elections, although remaining inconsistencies negatively affected its implementation. […]

[…]

The Georgian people expressed their political will in yesterday’s elections. They did so in the hope of putting an end to a political conflict and the start of a new dialogue between all political forces in this country. Despite improvements to the election environment these elections did not make full use of the democratic potential of Georgia. All political forces should now commit themselves to constructive dialogue and compromise in order to address Georgia’s many challenges, including the reform of its electoral framework,” said Matyas Eorsi, head of the delegation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

One supposes that even if the words “international standards for democratic elections” were not mentioned, reference to people expressing their political will pretty much says that although it’s obvious that problems remain. Then again, these days it’s hard to tell with the OSCE/ODIHR and PACE who seem to later backtrack on preliminary statements if the political temperature starts to rise. Social Science in the Caucasus analyzes the statement.

So the preliminary report on yesterday’s Parliamentary Elections which ODIHR has just released again notes that the count had problems.

While this, as discussed yesterday, is not a good overall indicator for how the counts went throughout the country, it raises the question whether we can at least compare this report with the one for the Presidential Election in January. Presumably, if 23% of observers managed to find a bad count in January, and 22% identify problems now, it should mean that the number has remained relatively stable. So: in terms of count, the election roughly is the same.

Right? Actually, no. First, different observers have different standards in terms of what they characterize as “bad”. As the ODIHR statistician (a figure fighting for more attention internally, and fortunately making some progress) will tell you, Russian observers, for example, fill out their forms somewhat differently. Since there is no training, there’s no calibration of what “bad” means, and how to distinguish that from “reasonable” or “very bad”. Change the composition of the Election Observation Mission, and you may change the results. Although this is the biggest problem when comparing two very different missions (Georgia’s numbers, with 22% of counts assessed as bad or very bad and Armenia’s Presidential Election in February, with 16% in that category just can’t be meaningfully compared), it can also affect a comparison of two elections in the same country.

On first glance it would appear that the intention was there to hold a better election, but to be honest it’s really hard to tell these days. I guess a few more days and weeks are needed for everyone to add their two cents to the matter. Not being in Georgia, The Caucasus Knot wouldn’t like to conclude anything at this point, but does admit that an election better than those conducted in Armenia and Azerbaijan would be very welcome indeed.

Just one thing, however. I’m not entirely sure a constitutional majority by such a big margin is particularly healthy for a country. Sure, it makes governing and passing reforms easier, but it also effectively sidelines the role and purpose of an opposition. Of course, the situation with the Georgian parliament is not as bad as that with its Armenian counterpart, but anyway, I suppose if this was the will of the people…