Orban swipes at EU and says disputed Georgian vote was fair

Hungary's Viktor Orban congratulated Georgia's increasingly authoritarian government in person on Tuesday, on a visit to Tbilisi three days after it won a contested election.

Praising the vote as "free and democratic", he made no mention of the numerous allegations of vote violations. The EU made clear observers had not declared the elections to be free and fair and said the developments were "very worrying".

Georgia's pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, has refused to recognise the result and spoken of a "Russian special operation" to influence the result.

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

"European politics has a manual. If liberals win, they say it’s democratic, but if conservatives win, there's no democracy," he told reporters after talks with Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze.

"Here the conservatives won, so these are the disputes - you shouldn't take them too seriously."

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

Opposition parties and the president insist the election was "stolen" by a party accused of moving Georgia back into Russia's orbit. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Georgians had "a right to see that electoral irregularities are investigated swiftly, transparently and independently".

Western exit polls for opposition TV channels suggested that four opposition parties combined had won the election, before the Central Election Commission declared Georgian Dream the winner with 54% of the vote, and with it a majority in parliament.

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

Hungary holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, but the EU was at pains to point out he did not represent the 27 member states.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto, who was also in Tbilisi, said it was a disgrace that the EU had not recognised the result of the Georgian vote.

But he and Orban made no mention of the catalogue of violations produced by independent monitors.

Georgian monitoring group "My Vote" has compiled an exhaustive list of the types of violations that its 1,500 observers documented on Saturday and in the run-up to the vote.

My Vote said that ahead of the election, public teachers, cleaners and bus drivers were either asked to send in their IDs or had them confiscated, while families of vulnerable people were offered financial help in return for their vote.

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

• There was vote-buying and ballot-stuffing, while observers were prevented from doing their job
• Election officials and authorities did not respond to allegations of criminal offences
• The system of inking voters' fingers was not carried out properly, so voters could vote again elsewhere
• Voters were able to use other people's ID numbers to cast their ballots with the complicity of election officials
• Voters were able to collect numerous ID numbers by going from polling station to polling station.

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

My Vote has called for the results from 196 polling stations to be annulled, alleging that they accounted for an extra 300,000 votes.

Georgia's prime minister has denied allegations of widespread irregularities, telling the BBC the elections were generally "in line with legal principles". He has also denied that his government is pro-Russian and "pro-Putinist".

Georgia's beleaguered election commission has accused its critics of a "manipulative campaign" of disinformation and said it would recount votes in five randomly selected polling stations in each of Georgia's 84 election districts.

The commission says the US company whose system it used maintained that "duplicating a voter on the voter list is impossible, as each voter is registered only once".

"It is impossible to vote multiple times with a single ID, undergo double verification, or have a single voter registered across multiple precincts," the commission added, adding that trying to discredit the system was no more than denying reality.

The Georgian president told Swiss radio that the commission was "completely dominated by the party of power, and non-government organisations... have no influence over it".

"This state is captured," said Eka Gigauri of Transparency International, which was involved in the My Vote monitoring mission.

"We know anything might happen... and we know no-one will investigate it or react."