As results came in from Georgia’s parliamentary elections Sunday, sources in the capital city Tblisi told Newsmax that the increasingly likely big win for the ruling Georgia Dream Party would be a major boost for Vladimir Putin.
“Right now, Georgia is facing an existential choice with two radically different destinations,” Nino Japaridze, senior adviser at Edison Research and herself a Georgian, told Newsmax shortly before the balloting began. “A path that would make Georgia an integral part of Europe and NATO versus a path that would bring Georgia back into Putin’s orbit, where freedom and democracy have no oxygen.”
All signs now point to the latter path. With roughly 70% of the votes counted, Georgia Dream — which favors friendly relations with Russia and opposes involvement in the Russo-Ukraine War— had 53% of the vote.
Should the results hold up, Georgia Dream and its reclusive billionaire leader Bidzina Ivanishvili will completely dominate the politics of the former Russian republic.
That means, most observers agree, no assistance to Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Ivanishvili, widely considered the richest man in Georgia, and his supporters have long railed against what they call “the global war party:” that is, the opposition parties within Georgia and its international allies who, they charged, are trying to drag their country into Russia’s war against Ukraine.
President Salome Zourabichvili, a fierce critic of Georgia Dream for what she considers its anti-democratic tactics, told the Financial Times on the eve of the voting that the party’s “means of winning the election [is] rigging the elections. That has started.” Other opposition parties have already begun to charge that Georgia Dream used its control of the government to tamper with vote-counting and thus rig the election. Georgia Dream denied all charges.
Ivanishvili , 68, made much of his estimated $3.5 billion fortune in various businesses in Russia during the 1990s. Having founding Georgia Dream, he led the party to its first victory in 2012 and served just over a year as prime minister.
These days, he spends much of his time in his palatial glass home known as the “James Bond House” that includes his $1 billion art collection and prefers to have subordinates handle the governance. Irakli Kobakhidze, who worked for Ivanishvili’s construction company Burji and helped him start Georgia Dream, is the current prime minister.
Georgia is ruled by “a Russian government,” Zourabichvili told the Financial Times.
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