UNLIKE the presidential election in Kenya where the three-day post-vote hiatus at the Electoral Commission was clearly used to stuff the ballot boxes in favor of the outgoing Mwai Kibaki, Georgia’s presidential contest was deemed by independent monitors to be largely free and fair.
The incumbent President Mikhail Saakashvili this week won the snap vote he called by a convincing majority over his main rival Levan Gachechiladze. With 52 percent of the vote, the victory was outright and means there is no requirement to go to a run-off vote. Unfortunately Gachechiladze has protested the outcome, alleging in the face of impartial evidence that the election was rigged. Now while Kenya’s opposition leader Raila Odinga received widespread sympathy in the wake of his apparent defeat, Gachechiladze deserves no such consideration. Unfortunately, the vehemence of his response to the result is not a good reflection upon the fragile democracy that was finally established in Georgia after Saakashvili swept to power in the Rose Revolution in 2003.
It was opposition protests, broken up uncompromisingly by police using water cannon and rubber bullets, that prompted the president to challenge the electorate to renew his mandate. What is important now is that he uses his renewed power base wisely. There is no doubting that his personal style served to alienate former supporters. The economic reforms he has so far introduced have, as all such reforms initially, failed to bring the benefits to the very poorest. The corruption that was part of Soviet rule in Georgia has also not been eliminated, though fighting it was one of the president’s most welcome original election promises.
Saakashvili therefore needs to adopt a different governing style, reaching out even to his political enemies, in an attempt to restore stability to the political process and to the country as a whole.
There can be little doubt that Moscow is behind much of the political unrest and actively sponsors the political rebellion in the two breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia’s state-run Gazprom has repeatedly hiked the price of gas it supplies to Georgia and implemented sanctions which include the banning, on spurious health grounds, of Georgian products such as mineral water.
Even though it suits Putin’s Kremlin to pursue a policy of destabilization in its former colonial territories, for fear of Chechen independence, Saakashvili needs to try and mend fences with the Russians. One of Moscow’s concerns is the growing US influence in Georgia which it sees as part of Washington’s attempt to encircle it. Georgia needs to find a way of persuading Russia that though it wants to take advantage of Western investment and know-how, it is not as pro-Western as the Americans would like to believe.
This will not be easy. The Russians have everything to gain by the simple expedient of fomenting further instability. Only if Georgians take renewed pride in their independence from America as well as Russia can this tactic be better resisted.
