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GEORGIA AFTER THE LOCAL ELECTIONS OF 2 JUNE 2002Levan BERDZENISHVILI
Levan Berdzenishvili, General Director, National Library of Georgia (Tbilisi, Georgia)
Nearly 11 years have passed since the day our centuries-old country recovered its independence. During those years Georgia has already lived through parliamentary elections (in 1992, 1995, and 1999) and presidential elections (in 1995 and 2000) as well as elections to the local self-administration bodies (in 1998 and 2002). The last local elections were scheduled to the fall of 2001 however the authorities exploited all procrastination methods to postpone the date several times. Finally, elections did take place on 2 June, 2002 (in Rustavi, Zugdidi and Kharagauli voting took place later because of violations). Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two unrecognized republics, to which Georgian legislation does not extend, ignored the date. The autonomous republic of Adzharia voted on 16 June: its president Aslan Abashidze wanted to emphasize its devotion to the republic’s constitution. Those who saw it (nobody in Tbilisi has even seen it) say that under the constitution Adzharia reserved the right to fix the date of local elections. (It is known that the final document contradicts, in some points, the Constitution of Georgia.)
The post-2 June, 2002 political situation can be described as a fundamentally new one and differing from the balance of forces in the parliament. Formally, the New Right won the elections across the country (544 seats, or 11.40 percent of votes), the Industry Will Save Georgia bloc (479 seats, or 10.03 percent) comes next. The election bloc of Aslan Abashidze Vozrozhdenie (Resurrection)–XXI vek (21st Century) (196 seats, or 4.11 percent) was the third followed by the Socialist Party (187 seats, or 3.92 percent), while the Labor Party took the fifth place with 148 seats (3.10 percent). Candidates nominated by initiative groups rather than parties won the absolute majority of seats—2,747 (57.54 percent).
All political parties concentrated their election efforts in Tbilisi that prompted a conclusion that the local elections in the capital were the last test before the parliamentary elections scheduled for 2003. Elections in Tbilisi were based on the party lists—the system that is applied to the entire country during parliamentary elections. (Under the 1995 Constitution 150 deputies are elected by party lists and 85, according to the majority system.)
It should be said that the National Movement–Democratic Front and the Zhvania Team, two winners, only recently formed into independent political forces and ran for local self-administration in Tbilisi and…………………….
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