Matthew Goddard/BBCHungarian President Viktor Orban visited Tbilisi on Tuesday, three days after winning a disputed election in Georgia, to personally congratulate the increasingly authoritarian government.
He praised the vote as “free and democratic” but did not mention the numerous allegations of voting irregularities. this EU makes clear observers did not declare election free and fair He said the developments were “very worrying”.
Georgia’s pro-Western president Salome Zurabichvili refused to recognize the election results and said “Russian special operations” would affect the results.
Orban congratulated the Georgian Dream government even before the results were announced, while also lashing out at his EU partners.
“European politics has a handbook. If the liberals win, they say it’s democracy, but if the conservatives win, there is no democracy,” he told reporters after talks with Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze.
“Conservatives won, so these are controversies — you shouldn’t take them too seriously.”
But both the United States and the European Union have criticized the conduct of the election, with both countries calling for independent investigations into violence and intimidation and alleged blatant violations of new electronic voting procedures.
Opposition parties and the president insist the election was “stolen” by a party accused of bringing Georgia back into Russia’s orbit. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Georgians “have the right to see electoral irregularities investigated quickly, transparently and independently”.
Exit polls for Western opposition TV channels showed that the four opposition parties combined won the election, before the Central Election Commission declared Georgian Dream the winner with 54% of the vote, giving it a majority in parliament.
Despite criticism from EU colleagues, Viktor Orban arrived in Tbilisi on Monday evening, not far from massive demonstrations by tens of thousands of Georgians protesting the election results.
Hungary holds the rotating EU presidency, but the EU is at pains to point out that he does not represent the 27 member states.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, also in Tbilisi, said it was a shame that the EU did not recognize the Georgia vote results.
But he and Orban did not mention the catalog of violations raised by the independent monitor.
The Georgia monitoring group My Vote compiled an exhaustive list of irregularities recorded by its 1,500 observers on Saturday and before the vote.
My Vote says that before elections, public teachers, cleaners and bus drivers are either required to submit ID or have it confiscated, while disadvantaged families receive financial help in exchange for their vote.
My Vote said several different schemes were used on election day:
- There was vote-buying and vote-stuffing, and observers were unable to do their work
- Election officials and authorities have not responded to criminal charges
- The system of ink on voters’ fingers was not properly enforced so voters could vote again elsewhere
- Voters were able to use someone else’s ID number to vote with the collusion of election officials
- Voters were able to collect large numbers of ID numbers as they traveled from polling station to polling station.
President Zurabicvili has told the BBC that so-called carousel voting has taken place, “where a person can vote 10, 15, 17 times with the same ID”.
My Vote is calling for the results from 196 polling stations to be annulled, claiming they accounted for 300,000 more votes.
Georgia’s prime minister rejected accusations of widespread irregularities and told the BBC that the election was generally “in compliance with legal principles”. He also denied that his government was pro-Russian and “pro-Putinist”.
The embattled Georgia State Election Commission has accused its critics of a “manipulation campaign” of disinformation and said the recount would be conducted at five randomly selected polling stations in each of Georgia’s 84 precincts.
The committee said the U.S. company that used the system insisted “It is impossible to copy voters on the electoral listbecause each voter is only registered once.”
“It is not possible to use one ID to vote multiple times, to perform two-factor verification or to register a voter in multiple precincts,” the commission added, adding that attempts to discredit the system amounted to a denial of reality.
The Georgian president told Swiss Radio that the committee is “completely dominated by the power parties and NGOs… have no influence over it”.
“This state has been captured,” said Eka Gigauri of Transparency International, which is involved in the My Vote monitoring mission.
“We knew anything could happen … and we knew no one was going to investigate it or respond.”
