The pro-opposition President, Salome Zourabichvili, stated that Georgians were “victims of what can only be described as a Russian special operation – a new form of hybrid warfare waged against our people and our country.” However, when asked by Western journalists to substantiate this, she could only say that the government had used “Russian methodology.”
The Biden administration and other Western governments and institutions have not even waited for detailed reports from their own observers to call the election results into question. Moreover, it must be stated with regret that many of these observers can hardly be called objective.
President Biden, absurdly, “cited international and local observers’ assessments that elections in Georgia were not free, nor fair;” absurdly, because the local observers are overwhelmingly from NGOs closely linked to the Georgian opposition. As to monitors from the West, in many cases their parent institutions have spent months denouncing the Georgian government as undemocratic and under Moscow’s sway.
While I doubt that the opposition nor the powers that want them in charge are above reproach here, the arguments as to why what they’re saying is false and based on a western agenda don’t stand up to the most basic logic seive either.
It is fully possible for the incumbent to have run a fully corrupt campaign complete with ballot stuffing and intimidation/misinformation AND for the observers to not be objective either. One doesn’t cancel out the other.
The big question is: were the elections provably legitimate and above reproach, and will the majority of Georgians respect the results?