Georgia's ruling Georgian Dream party won Saturday's parliamentary election, receiving more than 54% of the vote, the Central Electoral Commission said on Sunday.

The result is a setback for those Georgians who would like their country to  integrate into the EU, as the Georgian Dream party is seen as tending more toward Russia than the West, despite declarations to the contrary.

Pro-European opposition parties have rejected the preliminary result and announced protests, with President Salome Zourabichvili claiming the country had been the victim of a Russian "special operation." 

Zourabichvili said she would not recognize the result, caling the tabulation a "total falsification" and invited fellow Georgians to take to the streets at 7:00 p.m. on Monday in protest.

Charles Michel, president of the European Council, took to social media platform X on Sunday to call for "the Central Election Commission and other relevant authorities to fulfill their duty to swiftly, transparently and independently investigate and adjudicate electoral irregularities and allegations thereof."

Georgia's jailed former President Mikheil Saakashvili, the founder of the opposition United National Movement, also called for mass protests in a Sunday statement.

United National Movement chair Tina Bokuchava accused the Central Election Commission of carrying out Georgian Dream's "dirty order" claiming it "stole victory from the Georgian people and thereby stole their European future."

EU dreams on hold

Georgian Dream, a conservative, nationalist party founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili — who largely made his fortune with business deals in Russia and has promised to ban all opposition parties — secured 54.09% of the votes with almost all ballots counted, election official Giorgi Kalandarishvili announced in the capital,Tbilisi. 

He said a union of four pro-Western opposition alliances received 37.58% of the votes.

Georgian Dream will therefore enter its fourth consecutive term in office with 89 parliamentary seats, while Georgia's four opposition parties will have 61.

Although Georgian Dream says it wants Georgia to join the EU, the fact that it also favors closer cooperation with Russia would seem to conflict with this declared aim.

Speaking with DW about the result, Stefan Meister of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) said, "If Georgian Dream really has won this election I think it will bring Georgia away from the path toward the EU and it will lose its orientation. And that means Russia will have more leverage… more leeway to impact Georgia and the country's becoming more and more authoritarian."

Meister added that the opposition offered no real alternative for voters, noting that Georgian Dream "made other topics a main issue of the election… and that was the war… Russia's war in Ukraine."

In the end, Meister said the vote had come down to people's personal security and the country's socio-economic future.

Brussels says Georgia's membership application is frozen, citing what it sees as authoritarian tendencies on the part of the government after it enacted a number of controversial laws.

Those laws include sweeping curbs on LGBTQ+ rights modeled on similar Russian legislation.

What international observers said about the Georgia election

Observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) said the conduct of the election was evidence of "democratic backsliding" in the country.

Its monitoring mission said it had noted cases of voter intimidation, vote buying and double voting, particularly in rural areas, and said the elections were marred by media polarization and hate speech directed both at the opposition and at civil society.

"We continue to express deep concerns about the democratic backsliding in Georgia," Antonio Lopez-Isturiz White, head of the European Parliament's delegation to the OSCE mission, told reports. "The conduct of yesterday's election is unfortunately evidence to that effect."

Lopez-Istruiz White added that Georgian Dream had used what he called hostile rhetoric and had "promoted Russian disinformation" and conspiracy theories ahead of the election in an effort to "undermine and manipulate the vote."

German Foreign Office spokesman Sebastian Fischer told DW: "There were significant irregularities with regard to voter manipulation and intimidation and problems with maintaining the secrecy of the ballot."

"We condemn these violations of international norms and join calls by international local observers for a full investigation into the reported irregularities."

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that he supports calls for investigations into "election-related violations" in Georgia. "International observers have not declared the result to be free and fair," he said.

"We condemn all contraventions of international norms and join calls from international and local observers for a full investigation of all reports of election-related violations," Blinken said in a statement.

Others, like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, were more enthusiastic, so much so that he posted congratulations to Georgian Dream for "an overwhelming victory" on the social media platform X before the election results were published.  

Russia-friendly Orban, currently the holder of the EU's rotating presidency, will travel to Tbilisi on Monday according to the Georgian government.  

js,tj/wd (Reuters, dpa, AFP)