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30 Sep, 2021

Statement by Givi Mikanadze

Hello,

We would like to provide the public with information on the monitoring of the upcoming municipal elections by local organizations.

The people of our country are convinced that the opposition has no vision and therefore cannot offer the voters anything concerning the development of the next 4 years.  The Georgian Dream team carried out an active pre-election campaign in all cities and municipalities and presented to the population the concrete results of the projects implemented over the last 4 years. We also informed the population about the important plans that are focused on the well-being of each citizen and which should bring more benefits to each of our fellow citizens in the years to come.

Despite numerous briefings and statements made by us, the radical wing of the opposition is focused not on October 2, but on October 3, on destruction and disorder.  In this regard, radical opposition party televisions are actively involved in the process, while NGOs affiliated with them are trying to discredit the CEC in the run-up to the elections and are preparing for biased monitoring on Election Day.

Three weeks ago, we provided the public with interim information about local observation organizations that have registered at the CEC to monitor the October 2 elections and which are confirmed by public sources to be in direct contact with the parties.

We have publicly called on them to provide information to the public by whom and from what sources they are funded. We are not surprised that they did not do so, which reinforces the feeling that they are funded by the opposition parties affiliated with them. Today we present a brief summary report on the local observation organizations registered at the CEC, which are expected to monitor the October 2 elections.

As of September 30, the CEC had registered 88 local organizations, 16 of which did not have experience in election monitoring in previous years. Based on the public sources, it was found that 20 out of these 88 organizations, i.e. in fact every fourth organization is affiliated with parties; 15 of them with the National Movement, 3 - with European Georgia and 2 with the party For Georgia. It is remarkable that 88 local organizations will have a total of 31,170 observers for the October 2 elections, of which 8482 observers come from 20 organizations affiliated with the parties, which is 27% of the total number of observers. In other words, every fourth local observer will pursue the interests of the parties at the polling stations.  It is more than clear that the observation mission produced by these organizations cannot be objective. We let the public analyze and assess this issue.

Here we would like to emphasize that the identification of the presented organizations in affiliation with specific political entities was carried out based on pubic sources. We do not exclude that among the remaining organizations there are still some organizations covertly affiliated with specific political entities.

We call on these organizations once again to make public their source of funding. We would like to inform you that today the above-mentioned information will be provided to international observation missions and diplomatic representations accredited in Georgia with the relevant analysis and attached catalog.