Georgia: Official Results
Writing on his blog, This is Tbilisi Calling, the BBC’s Matthew Collin says that it’s finally official. The Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, has been re-elected, but you’ve read that before, right? And that was even before the official results were announced.
It’s around 0500 here in Tbilisi, and the head of the Georgian election commission has just told us that Mikheil Saakashvili has been re-elected as the country’s president, based on final preliminary results. Since the political crisis began in September, we’ve had allegations of murder plots and conspiracies to overthrow the government, mass demonstrations, riot police gassing and beating protesters, special forces shutting down the country’s most popular television station […], a series of covertly-recorded tapes supposedly proving dastardly plans and unsavoury connections, the arrest and exile of a former senior minister, accusations of ballot-rigging competing with assertions that Georgia has passed a ‘democratic test’, as well as wild threats and even wilder accusations made even more murky by ubiquitous conspiracy theories. But is it over yet? After all that’s happened in such a short space of time, that seems doubtful.
Fun and games in the South Caucasus. We’ll be playing some of them in Armenia soon enough as well although it remains to be seen whether the ongoing saga underway in Georgia will eclipse preparations for the presidential vote here.
