Georgia’s ruling party has managed to elect a far-right loyalist as president in a controversial electoral process, as the country’s constitutional crisis and pro-EU protests deepen.
The Black Sea nation has been in turmoil since the ruling Georgian Dream party claimed victory in October’s disputed parliamentary elections. His decision last month to delay European Union membership talks triggered a new wave of mass rallies. A constituency, controlled by the ruling Georgian Dream party and boycotted by the opposition, elected Mikheil Kavelashvili with 224 votes as the next head of state for a five-year term, Central Election Commission Chairman Giorgi Kalandarishvili said.
The opposition denounced today’s elections as “illegitimate” and said the incumbent president, Salome Zurabishvili, remains the country’s only legitimate leader. Zurabishvili, pro-Western and at open war with Georgian Dream, refuses to resign and calls for new parliamentary elections, paving the way for a constitutional showdown. This morning, protesters began gathering outside Parliament House, which had been cordoned off by police, ahead of a demonstration planned for this evening.
Thousands of pro-EU demonstrators filled the streets of the capital on Friday, before gathering outside parliament for a 16th consecutive day.
The outgoing president defined today’s vote as “a parody… an event completely devoid of legitimacy, unconstitutional”. Opposition groups accuse Georgian Dream of rigging the October 26 parliamentary vote, backtracking on democracy and bringing Tbilisi closer to Russia, all at the expense of the Caucasian nation’s constitutional bid to join the European Union.
Kavelashvili, 53, was the only candidate for president, a largely ceremonial position; He is known for his vehement anti-Western invectives and his opposition to LGBTQ rights. Georgian Dream canceled direct presidential elections in 2017, replacing them with the vote of an electoral college, effectively controlled by the party.
With Zurabishvili refusing to leave office, opposition MPs boycotting Parliament and protests showing no signs of abating, the legitimacy of Kavelashvili’s election has been undermined from the start. An author of the Georgian constitution, Vakhtang Khmaladze, argued that all decisions of the new Parliament are null and void because we must wait for the ruling on Zurabishvili’s request to invalidate the October elections. Georgia is facing an unprecedented constitutional crisis,” Khmaladze said. It is not yet clear how the government will react if Zurabishvili refuses to step down after his successor takes office on December 29.
