U.S. To 'Closely Monitor' Elections In Georgia

The United States said on Tuesday it would be ‘closely monitoring’ the forthcoming elections in Georgia, amid concerns that a pro-Russia ruling party might be ‘rigging’ it,  TURAN’s Washington correspondent reports.

“We want to see there be free and fair elections in Georgia, and we’ll be closely monitoring in the days ahead,” State Department’s correspondent Matthew Miller told a daily briefing when asked by TURAN about increasing concerns over “Georgian Dream”s efforts to falsify the October 26 elections.

The move came as both EU officials and Georgia’s president Salome Zourabichvili have accused the ruling party of deploying Kremlin-inspired intimidation tactics to rig upcoming elections.

Zourabichvili told the Financial Times her country was being ruled by “a Russian government” and urged voters to choose between the EU and Russia.

In power since 2012, the Georgian Dream party was waging a campaign based on propaganda, polarisation and fear tactics — just like in Russia, she said.

Opposition and civil society leaders worry that if GD and the other parties are level on 40 per cent after the vote, then the ruling party might try to manipulate the results, leading to mass demonstrations possibly followed by a police crackdown, the Financial Times writes.

The EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell also said on Monday that the recent actions of Georgia’s ruling party “signal a shift towards authoritarianism” and therefore the EU accession process “is de-facto halted,”

“Let’s wait for the upcoming Parliamentary elections, which will be a crucial test for democracy in Georgia and its European Union path,”  Borrell told a Monday briefing in Brussels.

Alex Raufoglu