Hungary’s Orban takes a swipe at the EU and tells the PM that a no vote is right

Hungary’s Viktor Orban congratulated Georgia’s growing government in person on Tuesday, during a visit to Tbilisi three days after winning a contested election.

Hailing the vote as “free and democratically controlled”, he did not address the many allegations of vote-rigging. I The EU made it clear that the observers did not declare the election free and fair and said the development was “very worrying”.

The president of Western Georgia, Salome Zourabichvili, refused to recognize the result and spoke of “special operation of Russia” to influence the result.

Orban, who had congratulated the Georgian Dream government even before the result was announced, also took a swipe at his EU partners.

“European politicians have a manual. If the liberals win, they say it’s a democracy, but if the conservatives win, there is no democracy,” he told reporters after talks with the Prime Minister of Georgia, Irakli Kobakhidze.

“Here the Conservatives won, so these are arguments – you shouldn’t take them too seriously.”

But criticism of the election’s conduct has come from the US and the EU, both of which have called for an independent investigation into violence and intimidation, as well as allegations of flagrant violations of the new electronic voting process.

Opposition parties and the president insist the election was “stolen” by a party accused of returning Georgia to Russia’s path. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Georgians “have the right to see that electoral irregularities are investigated quickly, transparently and independently”.

Western polls by opposition TV channels suggested that the four opposition parties jointly won the election, before the Central Election Commission announced Georgian Dream as the winner with 54% of the vote, and a majority in parliament.

Despite criticism from his EU colleagues, Viktor Orban arrived in Tbilisi on Monday night, a short distance from a large demonstration of tens of thousands of Georgians protesting the result.

Hungary holds the presidency of the European Union, but the EU has been at pains to point out that it does not represent its 27 member states.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, who was also in Tbilisi, said it was a shame that the EU did not recognize the result of the Georgian vote.

But he and Orban did not discuss the catalog of violations produced by private watchdogs.

The Georgia watchdog group “My Vote” has compiled a comprehensive list of the types of violations its 1,500 viewers recorded on Saturday and during the run-up to the vote.

My Vote said that before the election, public teachers, cleaners and bus drivers were asked to submit their IDs or have them confiscated, while families of vulnerable people were given financial assistance to get their vote.

On election day, My Vote says several different schemes were used:

• There was vote buying and vote casting, while observers were prevented from doing their job
• Election officials and authorities have not responded to the allegations of criminal charges
• The system of inking voters’ fingers was not done properly, so voters will be able to vote again at another location
• Voters were able to use other people’s ID numbers to vote in accordance with election officials
• Voters were able to collect multiple ID numbers by moving from polling station to polling station.

President Zourabichvili had already told the BBC that so-called carousel voting had taken place, “where one person can vote 10, 15, 17 times with the same ID”.

My Vote called for the results of 196 polling stations to be annulled, claiming they received more than 300,000 votes.

Georgia’s prime minister has denied allegations of irregularities, telling the BBC that the election was generally “in accordance with the principles of law”. He also denied that his government supports Russia and “supports Putin”.

Georgia’s frustrated election commission accused its critics of a “campaign of deception” and said it would recount votes at randomly selected polling stations in each of Georgia’s 84 counties.

The commission says the American company that used the system ended up saying “Repeating a voter in the voter list is not possibleas each voter is registered only once”.

“It is not possible to vote multiple times with one ID, be verified twice, or have one person register to vote in multiple places,” the commission added, adding that the attempt to discredit the system was more than a denial of the truth.

The president of Georgia told Swiss radio that the commission “is completely controlled by the power group, and non-governmental organizations … have no influence on it”.

“This state has been captured,” said Eka Gigauri of Transparency International, who was involved in the monitoring program My Vote.

“We know anything can happen… and we know no one will investigate or react.”