Georgia votes in election seen as stark choice between Russia and West
TBILISI - Georgians voted on Saturday in a parliamentary election depicted by both sides as an existential battle that will determine whether the country integrates closely with the West or leans back towards Russia.
"Either we elect a government that serves you, the Georgian people...or we elect an agent of a foreign country that will only fulfill the tasks of a foreign country," Ivanishvili, considered to be the country's main powerbroker, said as he cast his vote in Tbilisi on Saturday. Georgia, which lost swathes of its territory to Russian-backed separatists in the 1990s and was defeated in a brief Russian invasion in 2008, was for decades one of the most pro-Western states to emerge from the Soviet Union.But since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Georgian Dream has moved the country decisively back towards Moscow's orbit, accusing the West of trying to lure it into war. The opposition calls the shift a betrayal of Georgia's European future.
The authorities used force to disperse demonstrations this year against a law requiring groups that receive funding from abroad to register as foreign agents, which the opposition and the West called a Russian-inspired measure to stifle dissent.Ivanishvili has cast Saturday's election as an existential fight to prevent what he calls a "Global War Party" in the West from pushing Tbilisi into direct conflict with Moscow.
Opposition parties and President Zourabichvili accuse Georgian Dream of buying votes and intimidating voters, which it denies.
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