Ruling Party MPs Discuss Election Code with European Experts

Senior lawmakers from the ruling party are visiting Strasbourg on October 3-6, to discuss Georgia?s election code with European experts.

The discussion will take place with experts from the Council of Europe?s Venice Commission and the OSCE.

The lawmakers include: Mikheil Machavariani, the vice-speaker; Giga Bokeria, the deputy chairman of the parliament?s committee for legal issues and Pavle Kublashvili, the chairman of the parliament?s committee for regional policy and self-governance.

All of them are also members of a parliamentary group, which has been working since March on possible amendments to the election code . The group also included representatives from the Conservative, Republican, New Rights, Industrialists and Labor opposition parties; they, however, quit the group, citing the ruling party?s non-cooperative stance.

The opposition primarily wants changes in the current rule governing majoritarian elections.

Fifty new lawmakers, out of 150, will be elected to the new parliament through a majoritarian system in the 2008 parliamentary elections. This will be a first-past-the-post, ?winner takes all? system ? something which has been criticized by all the main opposition parties.

The opposition has also been seeking the right to appoint their own representatives to the Central Election Commission (CEC), which is currently made up of certified election officials, who, according to the ruling party, have no affiliation with any political party.

The opposition also wants the current election threshold of 7% to be lowered to at least 5%. They say, however, that this demand is not a top priority and should not overshadow the first two demands.

The ruling party seems to be willing to make a compromise on decreasing the election threshold; but it has shown no sign of meeting the two other opposition demands.

Mikheil Machavariani, the Vice-Speaker of the Parliament, however, said recently that the ruling party would respond to the opposition?s demands sometime in November.

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