Georgia Elections Debated at PACE

The May 21 parliamentary elections were better than the presidential one in January, Matyas Eorsi, head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s (PACE) election observation delegation to Georgia, said on June 23.

Eorsi told a PACE session in Strasbourg: “I am very happy to report to you that since the January 5 presidential elections, only four months have passed, and truly Georgia conducted substantially better elections compared to the presidential elections.”

The report by an ad hoc committee of the Bureau of the PACE on Georgian elections, unveiled on June 23, reads that the recent elections were marked by “a significant improvement of the election environment, in particular in the capital city, in comparison with the January 2008 Presidential election.”

It, however, also noted the low level of confidence of the public in the election process in Georgia and in this regard the report says: “The Ad hoc committee [of the PACE Bureau] is convinced that free and fair elections are only possible in a society which enjoys deep trust in the electoral system and in the election administration. In this regard, regrettably, these elections did not make full use of the democratic potential of the people of Georgia.”

Remarks by other speakers during the debate, mostly from others on the PACE election observation mission in Georgia, were in general in line with the report and the comments made by Eorsi.

A lawmaker from the Netherlands, Tiny Kox, however, voiced a dissenting opinion during the debates. “I remember Matyas Eorsi telling us [during the winter session of PACE] that the presidential elections were worse than expected, so if [the May 21 parliamentary elections were] better than [the] presidential elections, but the presidential election was worse than expected, how far did we develop?”

Eorsi said at the PACE winter session on January 21 that the presidential elections in Georgia were “a disappointment” and that he expected Georgia to run better elections.

“Matyas Eorsi also states that ‘these elections did not make full use of the democratic potential’ in Georgia,” Kox continued. “I know that sentence, because that is quite familiar to the sentence that we put in the declaration after the presidential election in Russia and I think we have to judge [both] elections on [the] same basis; that makes [the] Georgian elections not better than the Russian presidential elections and that must worry us very, very much.”