Georgia votes in high-stakes election affecting EU membership ambitions | Election News

Voting continues in Georgia in parliamentary elections that could shape the future of the country’s young democracy and its European ambitions.

Saturday’s vote will see an unprecedented alliance of pro-Western opposition parties challenge the ruling Georgian Dream party, which has faced criticism for stifling democracy and drifting towards Russia.

The European Union has warned that the elections will determine the country’s chances of joining the 27-nation bloc. Polls show that most Georgians are in favor of joining the EU, but accession talks were frozen in June after Georgian Dream passed a law restricting freedom of expression.

The polls opened at 8 a.m. (04:00 GMT) and will close 12 hours later, with approximately 3.5 million Georgians eligible to vote.

Opinion polls suggest opposition parties could win enough votes to form a coalition to replace Georgian Dream, which is controlled by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who founded the party and has a fortune in Russia.

“Tonight will be a victory for all of Georgia,” pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili, who is at odds with the ruling party, said after voting.

Bidzina Ivanishvili, the reclusive founder of Georgian Dream and former prime minister, said the election was “a very simple choice”.

“Either we will elect a government that will serve you, the Georgian people… or we will elect a representative of a foreign country who will only fulfill the duties of a foreign country,” he said as he cast his vote in the capital Tbilisi on Saturday. .

Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said he was confident Georgian Dream would win a majority in the 150-seat parliament and called for “maximum mobilization” from supporters.

Central Election Commission spokeswoman Natia Ioseliani said turnout was 9 percent at 10 a.m. (0600 GMT), two hours after voting began.

Georgians will elect 150 deputies from 18 parties. If no party wins the 76 seats needed to form a government for a four-year term, the president will invite the largest party to form a coalition.

‘They are dragging us backwards’

Many voters believe the election could be the most important vote of their lifetimes, determining whether Georgia will return to the path of EU membership or embrace authoritarianism and turn towards Russia.

“Most Georgians have realized that the current government is dragging us into the Russian quagmire, away from Europe, where Georgia really belongs,” musician Giorgi Kipshidze, 48, told an AFP news agency reporter at a polling station in central Tbilisi.

Georgian Dream, in power since 2012, initially pursued a pro-Western liberal policy agenda. However, in the last two years the situation has reversed.

His campaign centered on his conspiracy theory about a “global war party” that controls Western institutions and is trying to drag Georgia, still scarred from Russia’s 2008 invasion, into a war that only the Georgian Dream could prevent.

“Right now, some people don’t realize the danger they could face if we were defeated. But we will do our best to win and show people the right path,” Georgian Dream activist Sandro Dvalishvili told Reuters news agency.

Georgia, which lost part of its territory to Russian-backed separatists in the 1990s and was defeated in a brief Russian invasion in 2008, was one of the most pro-Western states to emerge from the Soviet Union in decades. But since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgian Dream has pulled the country decisively back into Moscow’s orbit, accusing the West of trying to draw the country into war.

Opposition parties and President Zourabichvili accuse Georgian Dream of buying votes and intimidating voters, but it denies these allegations.

Georgian Dream’s passage this year of a controversial “foreign influence” law targeting civil society sparked weeks of mass street protests and was criticized as a Kremlin-style measure to silence dissent.

Russia criticized “unprecedented attempts at Western intervention” in the vote on Friday, accusing it of “trying to twist Georgia’s hand” and “dictating the terms”.