Georgian ruling party wins election, near-complete results show

Tbilsi: Georgia's ruling Georgian Dream party received more than 54% of the vote in a parliamentary election on Saturday, with more than 99% of precincts counted, the electoral commission said on Sunday.

The result is a blow to pro-Western Georgians, who had cast the election as a choice between a ruling party that has deepened ties with Russia and an opposition that had hoped to fast-track integration with the European Union.

ISFED, a Georgian election monitoring group, said that it had registered violations including ballot-stuffing, voter intimidation and bribery that could have had an impact on the results.

It said that it had not seen significant violations in the counting of votes, most of which were cast electronically.

The electoral commission and Georgian Dream party did not respond immediately to requests for comment on the allegations, but on Saturday both hailed a free and fair election. Georgian Dream is expected to comment on the matter later on Sunday morning.

The country's four main opposition parties said that they do not recognise the results, with one opposition leader calling the results "a constitutional coup".

But Georgian Dream's reclusive billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had campaigned heavily on keeping Georgia out of the war in Ukraine, claimed success on Saturday night, with his party putting in its strongest performance since 2012 on the back of huge margins of up to 90% in some rural areas.

"It is a rare case in the world that the same party achieves such success in such a difficult situation - this is a good indicator of the talent of the Georgian people," Ivanishvili told cheering supporters on Saturday night.

Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream says it wants Georgia to join the European Union, though Brussels says the country's membership application is frozen over what it says is Georgian Dream's authoritarian tendencies.

An EU official told Reuters there was "a sense of disappointment" over the opposition's performance but Brussels was primarily concerned about a contested result leading to a standoff.

One local monitoring organisation called for the results to be annulled, based on reports of voter intimidation and vote buying, but it did not immediately provide evidence of large-scale falsification.

Last week Moldova voted narrowly to approve its European Union accession in a vote that Moldovan officials said was marred by Russian interference.