Georgia's Political Climate: Election Update

The President has not yet announced the date of the local self-governing elections, but the country is already preoccupied by the upcoming elections this autumn. Similarly to the Latin saying, all roads in Georgian politics lead to elections. The current political fuss on the constitutional reforms, the decrease of the President’s power, abolition of self-governing units and occasional fist fights between officials, are all there for a reason, which is winning the local elections.

When discussing the elections, the impetus falls on a number of regions, however, in this case the Mayoral elections are the most discussed. Who will become the Head of the country’s main city? Who will be the one that should control the budget of almost a billion? Obviously, it does matter who will be controlling this money both for the government and for the opposition. Public comments made by the ruling party make it apparent that the Georgian Dream is in the active process of choosing a candidate for the future mayor of Tbilisi. Until recently, it seemed that the Dream were suggesting the candidacy of the current Mayor Mr Narmania, but soon after the chief auditor of the country, Lasha Tordia, confronted the government, Narmania announced that he might become the next State Audit Officer of Georgia. Notably, the serving term of the rebellious chief auditor of the country finishes at the end of December, very soon after the elections.

The fact that Mr. Narmania is no longer set be the candidate anymore is also obvious since the government’s supporters openly state that Kakha Kaladze would make a good head of Tbilisi via social media. Although the main sociologist of the ruling party Zurab Bigvava denies the fact that the current mayor won’t be running for a second term, he also says that Mr. Kaladze is way ahead Narmania according to the polls. “NDI have published the social poll results two days ago, which showed not the personal ratings of these politicians, but the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of our society by means of their results. The catastrophically low number of just 8% evaluated the work of the current Tbilisi Major positively, 33% think of it as average and 52% believe it is bad. As for the Ministry of Energy, 29% assess their work as positive, 40% as average and 23% as negative. The data shown in the NDI survey shows opinion about the respective bodies, nevertheless, it indirectly implies the personal ratings of the heads of these institutions,” – said Bigvava in his interview with Nespaper Rezonansi.

Overall, the election strategy of Georgian Dream is more or less apparent, interesting still will be how the opposition will strategize their campaign. Generally speaking, the opposition is a wide notion, especially in light of there being more than 200 registered political parties in the country. However, all in all, only about three or four out of these would have the ambition and means to become the mayor of the capital, or even the head of one of the regional self-governing units. Of course, the main candidate in this regards is still the member of the former governmental team, that is, the United National Movement, allegedly the ex-Minister of Foreign Affairs Grigol Vashadze. Yet, it shouldn’t be excluded that the UNM is partial to changing its tactics and putting the stakes on a completely different candidate. It is, essentially, confirmed that the Republicans and Free Democrats will pair up for the coming autumn elections and many have publicly mocked this alleged political partnership a cross social media. One favored candidate is Aleko Elisashvili, who has not yet made the decision to run, but if he does – the Republicans and Free Democrats plan to support him. Another discussion is the candidate from the third parliamentary party, the Patriotic Alliance. As a member of the party, MP Gocha Tevdoradze stated to the Newspaper Rezonansi, their leaders won’t be running for the City Mayor’s post, and that the chosen representative will be announced in early June.

Zaza Jgarkava