National Council will conduct polls and primaries alone

On March 28 the National Council's registration of prospective opposition candidates for Mayor of Tbilisi and 1,024 council seats throughout Georgia concluded. Despite the National Council's frequent appeals to other opposition parties to take part in this process a significant number of them failed to do so. Consequently the public poll which will be conducted to identify "joint opposition candidates" will only allow the public to choose between the prospective candidates registered, not all possible opposition candidates.

On March 1 the National Council, which consists of the Conservative Party, People's Party, Movement for Fair Georgia, Party of the Future, Christian Georgia and the Patriots Party, signed an agreement saying that the single candidate for the Tbilisi Mayoral elections would be identified by means of an opinion poll and the candidates for local councils by means of primaries. The council candidates would be selected between April 5 and April 20 and the common Mayoral candidate would be nominated on April 9 at Vera Park basketball gym, the agreement said.

The National Council members wanted all opposition parties to join these efforts. “We appeal to all parties interested in the local government elections to register their candidates and take part in revealing the common opposition candidates. The peoples’ assistance will play the most serious role at the elections and voters should therefore be very active, especially those in Southern Georgia, where the Government traditionally falsifies the elections very effectively,” Conservative Co-Leader Kakha Kukava said.

However this appeal fell on deaf ears. The Alliance for Georgia, consisting of Our Georgia-Free Democrats, the Republicans and the New Rights, said that participating in the National Council’s scheme was unacceptable for several reasons. "Our leader Irakli Alasania’s rating is the highest of all oppositional leaders at 59%,” Davit Gamkrelidze, from the Alliance said. He added that the Alliance also objected to Zurab Noghaideli’s participation in this project (Noghaideli is the leader of the Movement for Fair Georgia), as its members have frequently criticised the former PM for his negotiations with The Kremlin, among other things. Kakha Kukava responded to Gamkrelidze’s statement by saying, "If Alasania really has a 60% rating, this means we probably have 3%, so logically the question to be asked is why the candidate with a 60% rating is refusing to participate in a public poll against a party with only a 3% rating?"

Levan Gachechiladze, the former Presidential candidate and leader of Defend Georgia who has also recently been suggested as a possible Mayoral candidate, stated: "I will support only a common opposition candidate. If the opposition parties want me to be that candidate I will take part in the elections, but this is up to Conservative leader Zviad Dzidziguri, People’s Party leader Koba Davitashvili, Alliance leader Irakli Alasania and Industry Will Save Georgia’s leader Gogi Topadze. These four should sit and work out how the common opposition candidate will be selected. It does not matter to me who this is, the most important thing is that there is a common candidate,” Gachechiladze said.

Only three opposition leaders, Zviad Dzidziguri, Koba Davitashvili and Party of the Future Leader Gia Maisashvili, have registered as prospective Tbilisi Mayor candidates. The public poll will ask voters to choose between these three and the most popular will be nominated as the candidate on April 9. All six National Council parties will put up prospective candidates in the primaries for the local council seats in the regions. The elections will be held on May 30 and all parties wishing to take part in them must register with the Central Election Commission by April 23.