GEORGIA’S PRO-EU PRESIDENT Salome Zurabishvili has alleged there was “sophisticated” voting fraud during the government’s parliamentary election victory over the weekend.

The election results have also been rejected by a coalition of opposition parties. 

According to near-final results announced by the electoral commission, the ruling party Georgian Dream won 53.92% of the vote in Saturday’s election, compared with 37.78% won by a union of pro-Western opposition alliances. 

The opposition has said the vote was unfair and has refused to concede defeat to a party it accuses of pro-Kremlin authoritarianism.

Moscow has rejected claims of interference in the vote while the European Union has cast doubt on the results.

“We aren’t meddling in Georgia’s internal affairs, and we have no intention of meddling,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said. He charged that it was the West that had tried to influence the outcome of the vote.

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has today called for an independent probe into “irregularities”, insisting that Georgians had a “right to know what happened”.

France has also expressed “concerns”.

“We expect the Georgian authorities to investigate irregularities observed before and during the vote,” France’s foreign ministry said after the polls on Saturday.

Formerly a part of the Soviet Union, Georgia has been invaded twice by Russia since it gained independence, but the eastern European state finds itself caught in the middle of a geopolitical contest between the West and its former occupier. 

The ruling Georgian Dream party – established by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who made his fortune in Russia – has become increasingly authoritarian over the past year, adopting laws similar to those used by the Kremlin to crack down on freedom of speech.

The EU suspended Georgia’s membership application process indefinitely because of the “foreign influence law” it passed in June.

Many Georgians viewed Saturday’s vote as a pivotal referendum on the opportunity to join the EU. 

‘Illegitimate’ 

President Zurabishvili, who has a figurehead role in Georgian politics, has declared the announced results “illegitimate”.

In an interview today, she told the AFP news agency that “quite sophisticated” fraudulent schemes were used in the weekend vote.

Zurabishvili said that the high level of planning of the election fraud seemed to be more than the government could have achieved to stay in power, and appeared to show “Russian methodology”, which she said was unsurprising “given what the relations are between the party in power and Russia”.

She alleged that Georgian Dream’s “electoral propaganda was totally copied from Russian propaganda” and “they have PR people… who come from Russia”.

The vote saw “the purchase of votes, pressure in particular on public office holders, pressure on the families of prisoners who can be promised release”, she alleged.

“There was money distributed visibly in minibuses at the exit of the polling stations,” she claimed.

In addition, the vote saw “methods linked to” electronic voting technology, used for the first time in the vote, she alleged.

Identity cards with the same number were used to vote multiple times in different regions, she added.

“It’s very difficult to accuse a government, and that’s not my role, but the methodology is Russian,” she said.

Calling Russia an “aggressor” against Ukraine, Zurabishvili added that “as long as Russia does not return to the path of international norms and standards, it is difficult to deal with it”.

Russia “is threatening, so we have to take that into account, and I think the population here is perfectly aware of that”, she said.

With reporting from AFP and Press Association