Protests in Georgia over disputed vote as PM threatens to ban opposition

Georgians protested on Saturday as the poll commission rubber-stamped the ruling party’s victory in a contested parliamentary vote marked by claims of Russian meddling and western calls to investigate fraud allegations.

The Caucasus nation’s pro-western opposition has denounced the 26 October vote as “fraudulent”, while the EU and the US have called for an investigation into alleged electoral “irregularities”.

The Georgian Dream party won 53.93% of the votes against 37.79% garnered by a union of four opposition alliances, the national election commission said.

Critics have blamed the increasingly conservative party for derailing Georgia from its European path and bringing Tbilisi back into Moscow’s orbit. Saturday’s final results by the electoral commission gave Georgian Dream 89 seats in the 150-member parliament, which the opposition deems “illegitimate” and has refused to enter.

Hundreds of opposition supporters staged a rally outside the commission’s headquarters, the latest in a series of protests against the disputed results since the October vote. The commission’s session was briefly disrupted when an opposition representative splashed black paint on the face of its chair, Giorgi Kalandarishvili, before the results were announced.

The Georgian president, Salome Zourabichvili, who is at loggerheads with the governing party, has also described the vote as illegitimate and accused Russia of interference. Moscow has denied meddling. She joined the opposition’s calls for a fresh vote, saying she would not issue a decree to convene the new parliament.

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in Tbilisi to protest against alleged electoral fraud. Universities in big cities across Georgia were gripped by student protests on Friday evening and the opposition has announced plans for a mass rally when the newly elected legislature holds its first session.

The prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, has insisted the elections were free and fair and said parliament would convene within 10 days after the release of the final results – even without a presidential summons from Zourabichvili.

Last week, Kobakhidze threatened to ban all the main opposition parties – “if they persist in actions that violate the constitution” – despite his party’s failure to secure the 113-seat constitutional majority it had sought in order to enact such a ban.

A group of Georgia’s leading election monitors has said they had uncovered evidence of a complex scheme of large-scale electoral fraud that swayed results in Georgian Dream’s favour.

The US pollster Edison Research, whose exit poll had predicted victory for opposition forces, has said the discrepancy between its forecast and official results “cannot be explained by normal variation” and “suggests local-level manipulation of the vote”. All of Edison’s previous exit polls conducted since 2012 in Georgia were in line with official results, and its exit poll models used in Georgia this year were the same ones used in US presidential election exit polls for ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC.

Earlier this month, the EU Council chief, Charles Michel, said “there are serious suspicions of fraud, which require a serious investigation”. Georgia is an EU candidate country, and before the election, Brussels had warned the vote would determine its chances of joining the bloc.