More than three weeks have passed since the elections in Georgia and the dust has not yet settled. Though the election results, which showed a clear majority for the pro-Russian ruling party, have now been certified, protests have not died down as much of civil society is convinced that the elections were fraudulent.
Attempts by opposition political parties and NGOs to challenge the vote in courts and before the Central Election Commission (CEC) produced no results. Though one district court did annul results in some precincts, other courts were blocked from doing so. The ruling Georgian Dream party insists that the elections were free and fair, and they’ve been supported by, among others, the Russian state and the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox church, which declared that “everything in this world is God’s will.”
At the session of the CEC that confirmed the fraudulent results, an opposition member dramatically hurled black paint at the Commission chair. According to some reports, he was then beaten by Georgian Dream supporters.
Students are playing an increasingly important role in the ongoing street protests demanding that new elections be called. Those protests have not only shut universities in the capital, Tbilisi, but also in the coastal city of Batumi. Students have set up tent encampments on their campuses and in some cases, classes have been cancelled.
Another key figure in the pro-democracy camp has been the Georgian President, Salome Zurabishvili, who has been publicly meeting with the election monitoring organisations that have challenged the result. According to media reports, she is unlikely to convene the new Parliament which the opposition parties are boycotting. But Georgian Dream says it will go ahead anyway, without presidential approval.
For Georgia to return to democracy and a European future, it is essential that it get international support. There was a dramatic display of this last week when top lawmakers from Finland, France, Germany, Sweden and the Baltic states came and spoke to tens of thousands of protesters in front of the Parliament building.
“Fight for your democracy, fight for your country, fight for your membership in the EU and NATO, and remember, there is no ‘Orban way’ to the European Union!” declared Lithuanian MP Žygimantas Pavilionis. The German SPD Bundestag member Michael Roth met with the Georgian President and afterwards declared that the elections “were not free and fair.” Roth said that unless the results were thoroughly investigated, individual sanctions might be applied by the EU to Georgian government officials responsible for the fraudulent vote.
As Georgian lawyer Eduard Marikashvili wrote, “The only barrier to Georgia’s path toward a Belarusian-like state is the vitality of Georgian civil society. This vitality will rely on the scope and strength of international support.”
But full-throated support for Georgian democracy is not yet the policy of the EU — or Britain.
As Georgian-based writer Ryan Sherman pointed out, reports by foreign election observers of widespread fraud would be “enough to plunge any EU country into crisis, yet, many major outlets like The Guardian and Reuters downplayed their gravity, adding that the OSCE stopped short of labeling the election ‘fraudulent.’ In fact, not a single major outlet included this critical clarification: assessing the legitimacy of an election falls outside the OSCE’s mandate.”
The Labour government in the UK has also been weak in its response. Speaking at on OSCE event, British diplomat Deirdre Brown offered this reaction to events in Georgia: “The United Kingdom calls on the Georgian authorities to transparently investigate reported irregularities, including those raised by local observers. We will continue to follow this process closely …”
But of course the Georgian authorities cannot relied upon to “transparently investigate” anything, as the last few weeks have shown. Instead of weak calls for everybody to play nice, Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy should follow the lead of the EU politicians who travelled to Tbilisi to stand with pro-democracy protesters. Without the strong support of countries like the UK — and more broadly, the left and labour movements — Georgia risks becoming another Belarus.
This article appears in this week’s issue of Solidarity.