In a matter of a few hours at time of writing, Georgians will go to the polls to vote in a presidential election called prematurely after a state of emergency followed opposition protests in Tbilisi at the beginning of November. After Mikhail Saakashvili came to power when street protests forced his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze, to resign during the so-called “Rose Revolution,” things have improved significantly in Georgia.

However, many Georgians are quite openly critical of Saakashvili. While still believing in the premise of the 2003 revolution and still convinced of the need for reform, many consider him mentally unstable and even question the official account of the circumstances surrounding prime minister Zurab Zhvania’s untimely death in 2005. Even so, despite some setbacks, Georgia was considered a beacon of relative democracy in the South Caucasus.

Until November 2007, that is. When riot police used excessive force, tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse an opposition rally in downtown Tbilisi, concerns about democracy in Georgia came to the fore. Today, the former Soviet republic’s democratic credentials will again be put to the test. However, the BBC reports that the opposition are already crying foul.

The main opposition candidate in Georgia’s snap presidential election has accused the authorities of preparing to rig Saturday’s vote.

“What is currently happening in Georgia is not a free election,” Levan Gachechiladze said in a statement broadcast on Georgian television.

[…]

Mr Gachechiladze complained that “we cannot use media outlets or promotional means”.

He added that a “smear campaign” was being staged against the opposition in the media.

TOL Georgia echoes such concerns and reports on the conduct of the pre-election campaign that bears an uncanny resemblance to how elections are conducted in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Sure, that Gachechiladze can even voice his concerns via the broadcast media in Georgia when his counterparts in Armenia cannot is quite remarkable for this region, but as Irakli Jibladze notes, the OSCE/ODIHR has raised concerns with how the media has covered the election.

There are no prizes for guessing who received the most attention.

Dieter Boden, Head of the OSCE/ODIHR Election Observation Mission (EOM), says the pre-elections media coverage of the Georgia’s presidential contenders is “unbalanced”.

[…]

“From time to time television evidently apportions more airtime to one of the presidential candidates compared with the rest. The share of the governmental candidate [Mikheil Saakashvili] in the pre-election TV campaign is tremendous.” he told newspaper Kviris Palitra. [media.ge , December 26]

TOL Georgia also says that while the situation appears to be calm in Georgia at present, that isn’t going to necessarily be the case after today. The opposition has promised to hold a continuous series of street protests if the vote is falsified, although it appears that things aren’t going to be so straight forward. Again reporting media bias and concerns with opinion and exit polls, Jibladze asks somewhat rhetorically, can the election already be considered “free and fair?”

It is relatively calm in Georgia, almost like before the storm. With the elections set in less then 24 hours, Georgians are gearing up to make their choice. […]

[…]

Why would the opposition refuse to accept Saakashvili’s victory in the first round? For number of reasons: first, those polls that claim that has such a chance, are closely affiliated with Saakashvili. One such research center is Greensberg Quinlan Rosner, which is funded by Saakashvili’s party. Of course their results put Saakashvili way ahead of his opponents.

Second, the exit polls will be planned by parties which are not acceptable to the opposition for their bias towards the authorities. Among them are state controlled televisions and Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. While it is clear that the state controlled media is biased (why later), I am not sure if the same stands for the GFSIS and other bodies that will craft the exit polls. But. The point here is that these parties MUST be acceptable for all sides. Such could be some European based organizations, but it seems the authorities don’t find this crucial.

Adding to the debate surrounding opinion polls in Georgia, and actually in the whole region, Christine Quirk comments on the latest poll commissioned by Saakashvili which shows him enjoying a commanding lead over Gachechiladze. The former Country Director of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Azerbaijan says that there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the poll, but adds that Saakashvili should still be somewhat concerned by what can hardly be considered overwhelming public support.

Nevertheless, she concludes that a Saakashvili victory looks likely.

[T]he Saakashvili campaign finally stepped up to the plate and hired a real pollster, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research from Washington. Among many others, VP Jeremy Rosner polled for NS/NU (Yushchenko’s party) in the 2007 parliamentary election in Ukraine. He’s the pollster that presidents and ruling parties hire when they want to be taken seriously outside of their own countries, particularly in Washington.

Rosner operates on the typical western model of strategic polling: as the president’s pollster, he is responsible for plotting out a roadmap to victory for his client, which, by the way, often means delivering really bad news. As a hired gun, Rosner has nothing to gain by pretty-ing up the numbers if they’re bad; if Saakashvili loses, GQRR loses. Pollsters like to win, and you don’t win by making things sound better for your client than they are. In fact, a dose of reality is what a lot of leaders need, especially those who tend to surround themselves with suck-ups.

[…]

[…] his poll showed Saakashvili with a better than two-to-one lead over his nearest rival (Levan Gachechiladze, at 19% to Saakashvili’s 42%) among all residents and a 30 percentage point lead over Gachechiladze among a subset of 846 likely voters (46% to 16%). This is good news.

Why would anyone be surprised by these numbers? Saakashvili is an incumbent and enjoys all the benefits of incumbency, including a lavish array of administrative resources, his use and abuse of which have been well-documented this election. He’s running against a cast of minor characters with no organization, no strategy other than buying votes (which, if credible, can be pretty effective) and minimal levels of public support. He exploited these strengths when he called an early election. Smart.

Now, if I was Saakashvili, I’d be a little concerned that despite all these considerable advantages, I wasn’t above 50%, particularly given the weakness of the opposition. The president has taken some pretty serious hits in the past few months, particularly after the events of November 7th. There’s a good chance, however, as Rosner pointed out, that the 16% undecided will break toward the incumbent, putting him above 50% and avoiding a run-off. If not, he stands to win easily in a match-up with either Levan Gachechiladze or Badri Patarkatsishvili.

To be fair to Saakashvili, there are those who consider that the opposition is not popular enough to make a strong showing at the polls today, and acting president Burjanadze has already alleged that they are instead more interested in attempting a new revolution rather than contest the vote. Moreover, despite the problems that Georgia is experiencing, Saakashvili can be credited with bringing about major positive change in a country that was once declared a “failed state.”

However, as Rob Parsons explains, reform was never going to be easy. In fact, it was going to be somewhat painful at times.

To a degree, this is a moment that was always going to arrive for Saakashvili. His economic reforms have earned Georgia the approval of western financial institutions and his commitment to the country’s democratisation has won him the backing of the United States and Europe, but they have come at a price.

The fight against corruption has made him many enemies - not least the thousands of policemen who have been sacked from their jobs and the businessmen who had become used to getting rich through comfortable deals with former governments.

But they are not Saakashvili’s main problem. His reforms have modernised government but have also cost thousands of people their jobs - particularly among the over-40 generations. Both the economy in general and foreign investment in particular are growing fast, but there is still widespread unemployment and next to no social-welfare net.

Saakashvili can boast with justice that Georgia today genuinely resembles a state: that there is electricity and gas twenty-four hours a day, that the army is a real army and that the police force is far less corrupt than at any time in living memory. But for the people on the wide margins of Georgian society that is not enough; they want jobs and enough money to cope with annual inflation of around 10%.

In fact, the growing efficiency of the state has in some respects made life harder. Today, everyone has to pay taxes, electricity is metered and has to be paid for, and the petrol mafia has been squeezed out. That means increased revenues for the state but also fewer opportunities for the cheap black- market deals that once sustained a large part of the Georgian population.

Saakashvili has always known that he would have to pay a price in popularity for his reforms; but if it is proving higher than he anticipated, it is because of his own failure to communicate adequately with the Georgian people.

The Associated Press also makes the same point, but also adds that concerns with the conduct of the vote are very real indeed.

TBILISI, Georgia: Electricity shortages regularly threw Georgia into darkness before the young Mikhail Saakashvili was elected president four years ago and set out to transform the bankrupt former Soviet republic into a modern European state.

Saakashvili, his image now tarnished, wants his countrymen to remember those dark days when they cast their votes Saturday in a presidential election that is looking too close to call.

As if to underline the changes since he took office, the center of the Georgian capital glitters from a multitude of lights strung around buildings, monuments and trees in celebration of New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas.

[…]

Saakashvili’s campaigners have been accused of improper use of government funds and voter intimidation by Transparency International. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s election observer mission said it has received apparently credible reports of abuses.

Meanwhile, Russia Today says that more than a thousand election observers will monitor the vote, a move it says makes traditional forms of electoral fraud all the more difficult. Still, it’s unlikely that the vote will meet the same standards as that which brought Saakashvili to power with an abnormally high 98 percent of the vote. Riding high on the success of the Rose Revolution, he was always going to win that election.

This one is not so certain and it’s that which fuels concerns that the same post-Soviet legacy of falsified elections will materialize in Georgia once again. Given that Armenians will go to the polls to elect a new president next month, the conduct, outcome and verdict on today’s vote will have obvious influence on what happens here.

That the opposition in Georgia will claim the election was falsified in the event of a Saakashvili victory, especially if that occurs in a first round, is obvious. However, how the international community reacts is another matter.

Unfortunately, while it would be desirable to hope that the presidential election in Georgia today is given a clean bill of health by international election observers, there is enough reason for uncertainty, especially when it comes to the conduct of the pre-election campaign although it does seem somewhat better than what we’re used to in Armenia.

Perhaps this is the most tragic aspect of the vote as Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy rather pessimistically concludes.

As political drama goes, it makes for good reading. But the outcome is beginning to seem all too predictable and depressing. Saakashvili seems certain to win just as the opposition seems certain to challenge the victory as illegitimate (post-election protests are already in the works), leading to further instability in an already tense region. The scenario is becoming all too familiar—it’s a sad statement on the state of democratic institutions when the most likely reaction to news of an upcoming election in a developing nation is a cringe.

Well, we should all know soon enough, and I’ll post more when we do. Also expect a post for Global Voices Online on Sunday. In the meantime, as the conduct of the vote today is of crucial importance to both Armenia and Azerbaijan which will also hold elections this year, we can only hope that this is one test Georgia passes. For sure, there will be significant concerns raised with the pre-election campaign, but today’s vote has to be as clean as it possibly can be.

Here’s hoping, but nothing is certain when it comes to elections in this region.