The first official results of Sunday's presidential election in Georgia suggest that neither of the two main favorites will win enough votes to win in the first round, agencies report.
The president of the election commission, Tamar Zvania, said that the results collected from 13 percent of polling stations show that the candidate of the ruling party, Salome Zurabishvili, wins 40,05 percent of the votes, while the opposition candidate, Grigol Vashadze, gets 37,93 percent.
Georgians went to the polls on Sunday to elect a president, for the last time by universal suffrage, in an election seen as a test for the increasingly unpopular ruling party.
Former ambassador to France and former foreign minister Zurabishvili, who is supported by the ruling Georgian Dream party and opposition leader Vashadza, who was also the minister of foreign affairs of this Caucasian country, have the best chances in these elections.
The polls closed at 20:40 p.m. local time, and according to exit polls by the American public opinion polling agency Edison Research, Zurabishvili and Vashadze are tied and receive almost XNUMX percent of the vote.
If this result is confirmed, a second round will be held in order to choose one of the two candidates for the presidential office, which is mostly protocol after the recent constitutional changes.
Speaker of the Georgian Parliament Irakli Kobahidze, one of the leaders of the ruling party, said at a press conference on Sunday that Zurabishvili "receives more than 50 percent and will most likely win in the first round." But Vashadze said that the government is "preparing a big electoral fraud by buying votes and stuffing ballot boxes". He said that the observers documented hundreds of violations of election rules.
At 17 p.m., the turnout was above 38 percent, according to the Georgian Election Commission.
Zurabishvili and Vashadze have similar views on several points: both are fighting for closer proximity to the European Union and NATO, which Georgia has been wanting to join for more than ten years.
Grigol Vashadze, with the support of the United National Movement founded by ex-president Mihail Saakashvili, now in exile, and with the support of ten other political parties, complains to the party in power that it failed to reduce poverty in that country with 4,5 million inhabitants.
If elected, Vashadze intends to organize early parliamentary elections as demanded by the opposition parties, reports Hina.
In the event of the ceremonial assumption of office of the new president, the new constitution will enter into force, on the basis of which the presidential office becomes mostly protocol. From 2024, the president will be chosen by an electoral college with 300 members.
More than 3,5 million people were invited to the polls in the elections monitored by international observers of the OSCE.
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