Democratic Georgia

Local Elections 2010: The "Latest Test" for Georgian Democracy

2010-05-28T12:50:00.000-04:00

I've been away from this blog for some time, but I'm back in time for Sunday's local elections.

In the last few months, one thing is for sure -- I've been struck by how relatively "normal" the election campaign has been, virtually from the start of February when the president's office issued a verbal guarantee that elections would indeed be held on the day Saakashvili had promised. Surely, much of this has to do with the fact that opinion polls have given incumbent Tbilisi mayor Gigi Ugulava a commanding lead, but if the sense of "security" that this has given the government translates to an overall improved election environment and, most importantly, solid multiparty representation -- not only for the city council race in Tbilisi but across the country -- then this election will be considered an achievement, no matter who wins the mayor's seat.

Media

Yes, the mid-March Imedi "War of the Worlds" scandal was outrageous, but it at least discredited the controversial Imedi and reinforced the notion that transparency of media ownership and control is at least as important as responsible media coverage. If Imedi (or, say, Real TV) wants to style itself as some kind of "shock-jock" version of Fox News, fine, as long as the stations adhere to the law on broadcasting and code of conduct *and* their viewers have a precise understanding of the role of the state or its affiliates in their ownership structures (and other stations are allowed to develop and secure financial support freely). Transparency of media ownership ought to continue to be vigorously pursued after local elections.

And at least on conduct, the media monitoring done by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers for the EU and UN has demonstrated less imbalance in coverage than one might have expected, certainly in tone (with the national broadcasters largely refraining from "going negative" against opposition, unlike the mysterious, Tbilisi-based, pro-state Real TV, set up specifically to counter positive opposition coverage). Yes, incumbent Tbilisi mayor Gigi Ugulava has still had an advantage in coverage, but not an overwhelming one (though the last reporting period from May 13-19 exhibited substantially greater coverage than before). Unsuprisingly, "radical" opposition candidate Zviad Dzidziguri has received far more negative coverage than Irakly Alasania or CDM candidate Georgi Chanturia. And Rustavi-2 appears to have taken the Imedi experience to heart; the media monitoring has shown the station to be the most balanced in coverage of all the national broadcasters.

Administrative resources

Yes, the use of "administrative resources" (from official influence or intimidation to the illegal use of state resources to influence votes) appears to still be pervasive, with President Saakashvili himself being publicly dismissive of concerns about the misuse of state resources even to foreign audiences (and confusing the legitimate rights -- and expectations -- of incumbency with the misuse of state resources and personnel). Nonetheless, the amount of attention to the subject, including state-NGO debate, has been spectacular. Transparency International Georgia has done a great job addressing and investigating the issue in Tbilisi and across the country for a USAID-sponsored project. But a few things have been striking about their work: first, most of the findings they have released have concerned rural or small-town areas rather than major cities; second, the scope of their reported violations, while serious, have still largely been on the side of the less egregious; third, the government was responsive to their reporting, with both the Tbilisi Mayor's office and the Inter-Agency Task Force issuing detailed rebuttals on at least the first TI report concerning Tbilisi, as well as at least issuing pledges to investigate violations. More work needs to be done to come to a conclusion regarding that extraordinary exchange between the state and an NGO, and clearly a lot more work needs to be done on getting the laws to function as they are supposed to, but the fact of the exchange was itself an advance.

CEC and Constitutional Reform

The CEC's evident commitment to transparency and, especially, "all hands on board" party work for tackling the perennial problem of the voter lists has also been impressive. A number of problems with voter lists were uncovered, and the CEC appeared eager to address them. I look forward to hearing a final assessment of this process by those who were involved in it, but the final voter list, at least, has not set off any alarms. The fact that the CEC chairman and the parliamentary chairman have both repeatedly reiterated the importance of a democratic, transparent vote has also been noted.

Finally, in the midst of all this, the state commission on constitutional reform issued a draft for a new constitution that rebalances the distribution of power between the executive and legislative branches (which, by the way, is part of a broader trend of constitutional reform taking place across post-Soviet Eurasia).

Election day and after

My perspective on local elections is, admittedly, coming from afar; my guarded optimism primarily concerns elections in urban areas more than the countryside; and in general my view is contingent on these last few days, election day, and the manner in which the CEC and courts handle appeals. I'll remain silent on my expectations for the mayor's race, but I certainly expect to see substantial opposition representation at least in several city councils across the country, even in sufficient numbers to play a role in selecting some indirectly elected mayors. Improvements in process are valuable, but improvements in outcome are, in the end, going to be critical for setting Georgia on a path to multiparty democracy.

The Imedi Ownership Scandal: Is State Control over National TV Becoming Clearer?

2010-02-09T00:31:00.000-05:00

One of the most sustained criticisms of Georgian democracy is that the government has nontransparently wrested control and/or ownership over the two most professional television channels in Georgia, the private nationally broadcast Rustavi-2 and Imedi, which together enjoy over 60 percent of the market share of Georgian broadcast television and, according to a 2009 poll by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers, enjoy at least some trust among 59 percent of the population (while more than 50 percent of respondents trusted the two stations enough to opt for a response of at least 7 on a 10-point scale).

In recent months, however, Rustavi-2 and Imedi have come to look like identical franchises, utilizing the same journalists, incorrect news stories, and innuendo. It has also come to light that the government provides unspecified "state aid" to the broadcast media: the government says that Foreign Minister Grigol Vashadze's October 2009 reference to such aid in front of a London audience concerned only legal guarantees and tax breaks. Unrelatedly, the NGO Transparency International Georgia has observed that the 2008 revenues reported by all private, non-satellite television stations amounted to between double and triple their estimated advertising revenues, a gap it attributes to subsidies from "unknown sources" (which, presumably, could be owners, the state, or others who "order" media stories and coverage).

A perhaps not so coincidental set of circumstances last week has highlighted this issue of nontransparent ownership of Georgia's influential private broadcast stations, as well as the need to clarify the state's role in Imedi and Rustavi-2 in advance of the upcoming local election campaign (since most of the country gets its news from these national private stations).

The circumstances pertain to the ownership of Imedi, established by the late Badri Patarkatsishvili, a Georgian oligarch who openly turned against the government in 2007, using his finances and media holdings to promote mass demonstrations in favor of Saakashvili's resignation. Now, Joseph Kay, an (alleged) half-cousin that arrived in Georgia brandishing a power of attorney giving him the right to manage the deceased Patarkatsishvili's holdings, seems to have faced negative verdicts in three European courts against his claims to be a rightful executor of Patarkatsishvili's estate. More strikingly, a United Arab Emirates' investment company, to which Kay reportedly sold a 90% stake in Imedi in February last year and which is one of Georgia's biggest foreign investors, has unexpectedly denied ownership of Imedi, saying it doesn't know who its owner is.

Let me back up a few steps. In November 2007, Badri Patarkatsishvili swore to spend every "last [cent]... to liberate Georgia from this fascist regime," enraged as he was at the violent dispersal of protestors. Authorities subsequently shut down Imedi, froze Patarkatsishvili's assets, and accused him of seeking to overthrow the government (he later died of a heart attack, after an unsuccessful January 2008 bid for the presidency). Against the objections of Patarkatsishvili's widow, daughter, and sister, Joseph Kay (aka Kakalashvili) acquired control over Imedi, an acquisition that was upheld by the Tbilisi city court.

If the arrival on the scene of the locally unknown Joseph Kay wasn't enough to raise suspicions of murky dealings, less than a year later Kay said he sold 90 percent of his shares to RAK Georgia Holding, an affiliate of Rakeen Georgia, the local branch of the "property development arm" of RAKIA, the investment authority of Ras Al-Khaimah, one of the United Arab Emirates and a major investor in Georgia (which has a long-term management concession in Georgia's Poti port and reportedly leased a Tbilisi amusement park previously developed by Patarkatsishvili -- at least until his forty-nine year contract was cancelled after November 2007).

It was then announced that the new general director overseeing the finances of the Imedi media group would be Giorgi Arveladze, a longtime associate of Saakashvili, with past positions as secretary general of the United National Movement, the president's chief of staff, and minister of economic development.

So what has happened in recent days? First, the lawyers of Patarkatsishvili's family have issued a statement saying that courts in London, Gibraltar, and Lichtenstein have determined that Kay's claims to control various of Patarkatsishvili's properties are suspect. The statement says that the rulings include orders to freeze Kay's assets. (I have not seen independent accounts of the rulings, and Kay's lawyers have previously disputed the family's interpretation of court rulings.)

Second, in an interview with the English-language Abu Dhabi newspaper The National, RAKIA CEO and Rakeen executive chairman Khater Massaad denied that any firm related to either company owned Imedi -- the first disavowal of its kind since Joseph Kay and one Mark Monem, claiming to represent RAK Georgia Holding, held a press conference in February 2009 to report the sale, which the Georgian president's press office reportedly confirmed later that month.

How did Massaad explain the confusion? “There is somebody in Georgia who has created his own company with the name RAK Georgia Holding....This company exists indeed. But we have nothing to do with it. The problem is that I have not registered the name RAK as a brand.”

Indeed. So someone stole the RAK brand and, with the connivance of Joseph Kay, pretended that they purchased Imedi as a representative of Ras al Khaimah, one of Georgia's largest investors? And the emirate's investment companies didn't bother to correct this blatant misrepresentation? And the Georgian government went along with it? And then a ruling party stalwart took control of the media holding under the new ownership and allowed the misrepresentation to continue?

Actually, Transparency International Georgia unveiled a hint at the end of last year that this is, indeed, what happened -- even though neither they nor anyone else noticed at the time. In a report on television ownership, control, and regulation, TI Georgia indicated that the 90% owner of Imedi's parent company, according to Imedi's lawyer, was RAAK Georgia Holding, with two "As," a misspelling that, given the recent revelation, appears to have been an attempt to intentionally misrepresent the ownership of the company while avoiding any potential legal trouble.

But now that Joseph Kay may be running into legal trouble elsewhere, there is a chance that the new owners may not be as successful as they had hoped. At a minimum, the affair confirms suspicions about Joseph Kay which Georgia's courts must now find impossible to ignore with regard to his initial acquisition of Imedi.

For that matter, someone should ask Giorgi Arveladze, the Georgian National Communications Commission, the presidential press office, and any other official personnel or structures that have referred to Ras al Khaimah as the owner of Imedi what they have or haven't known about Ras al Khaimah's (non-)involvement in the purchase of Imedi; why Joseph Kay and "RAAK Georgia Holding" have never been taken to task for their misrepresentation; whether such misrepresentation has any legal consequences in Georgia; and, finally, who really owns Imedi.

Next up: Rustavi-2.

How Not to Win Friends and Influence People: The "election observers" and "Hitler quotation" affairs

2010-01-24T14:51:00.001-05:00

The Georgian government experienced two strange, seemingly minor, public relations fiascos last week: the "observer affair" and the "Hitler quotation affair." However minor, these incidents colorfully demonstrated a certain tone-deafness to (or disregard for) Western views on democratic political culture, in ways that the Georgian government justifies by its focus on "bigger" strategic issues (namely Russia).

The "observer affair" involved the dispatching by the government (evidently, by the interior ministry) of several hundred young men to Donetsk, a stronghold of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych (who polled first in the initial round of the election). This was after the Ukrainian central election commission rejected a Georgian government request to register as election observers some 2,000 "employees of various state structures" (as they were officially referred to, together, in theory, with representatives of unnamed NGOs). Allegedly corroborated by recordings of mobile phone conversations between Georgian government officials (including the interior minister) and even between Saakashvili and Ukrainian prime minister and presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko (who came in second), the Georgian "observer mission" appears to have been agreed upon with the latter. It also received support from outgoing president Viktor Yushchenko (who came in fifth, with six percent of the vote). The authorities have not disputed the veracity of the recordings (delivered anonymously to Ukrainian media outlets).

To put Georgia's actions in context, there are a few points to keep in mind. Clearly Georgia has reason to be concerned about a Yanukovych victory: Yanukovych is virtually the only mainstream politician in the post-Soviet space who has supported recognizing the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And maybe there was reason to be cautious about the possibility of concentrated electoral fraud -- Donetsk was a prominent site of fraud in Ukraine's 2004 presidential election. Third, Georgia has dispatched or attempted to dispatch its own electoral observers in the CIS before -- to Ukraine in 2004 and to Belarus in 2006, for example. Finally, there remains the obvious implications of someone (Russian intelligence being the most obvious candidate) monitoring the phone traffic of the highest Georgian and Ukrainian officials.

All that said, the "observer affair" remains problematic on a number of levels for what it reflects about Georgian governance. First is the self-absorption with which Georgia attempted on its own to dispatch to Ukraine far more "observers" (and state-organized ones at that) than did Europeans and Americans. The International Election Observation Mission, spearheaded by the OSCE and joined by Council of Europe and NATO parliamentary assemblies, recruited only around 800 monitors, compared to Georgia's couple of thousand.

Second is the notion of it being precisely Georgia -- with its "partly free" (.pdf) status, as ranked by the Freedom House democracy promotion NGO -- sending state-organized observers to monitor elections in "free" (according to Freedom House) Ukraine. Many Georgians and outside observers agree that the Georgian government should be focused in these weeks and months on instilling confidence in their own democratic institutions, rather than displaying such overwhelming attention to the institutions of its democratically more advanced neighbor.

Third is the spectacle of Georgia taking on the role, distortedly attributed to the West by critics of the "color revolutions," of an actor using the facade of democracy promotion to intervene in the internal affairs of others. If the Georgian observers had been rejected, and there had been no further action on the part of the government, this would not have become a news story. But the insistence on dispatching several hundred putative "observers" to Donetsk, and trying to spin them as "tourists" in the hopes of receiving last-minute accreditation, was the real fiasco. In the absence of official permission, this move allowed critics to insist that Georgia was seeking to inappropriately affect the outcome of the election race in Donetsk, even if the Georgian "guests" did not in fact have any intention to intervene.

Finally, of course, is the lack of concern this move evinced for potentially negative perceptions of Georgia in Ukraine, at least (and possibly not even exclusively) among the majority constituency opposed to Tymoshenko and Yushchenko.

Making far less news than the "observer affair" was the bizarre and unsettling story of the "Hitler quotation affair." Russian (and Georgian radical opposition) obsession with portraying Saakashvili as a fascist is not novel; Georgia's first president Zviad Gamsakhurdia was frequently tarred with the same label (and similar epithets, somewhat anachronistically, have been hurled at Georgia's Menshevik-led government of 1918-1921). Because of this, and because there is no easier way for Russia to attack neighboring governments that it dislikes (in Ukraine and Estonia, for instance) than to highlight any local tendency to laud "national patriots" that historically sided with the Nazis in the hopes of defending their lands against Soviet occupation, one would expect official Georgian structures to be extraordinarily careful to protect against such accusations (leaving aside the self-evident damage to Georgia's pursuit of European and Euro-Atlantic integration that would be done by hints that such claims had any truth to them).

Thus, one can only meet with astonishment bordering on disbelief a revelation concerning the airing of a program promoting army reserve service during the summer of 2008 by a television station openly operating in cooperation with Georgia's Ministry of Defense (who advertises the station and commissions "military programs" that make up "most of our broadcasts," according to the station, Sakartvelo TV). The otherwise innocuous video included a segment that concluded with this spoken and printed quotation: "It must be thoroughly understood that the lost land will never be won back by solemn prayers, nor by hopes in any League of Nations, but only by the force of arms," straightforwardly attributed in the video to "Adolf Hitler, 1932."

Obviously recognized as a problem now that it has belatedly been disseminated, the MoD has not helped matters by its official denunciation of the quote. In an official statement, the MoD disavows the quotation but not the fact that it appeared in a program that it must have commissioned. Instead, it refers to the quote, somewhat mystifyingly, as representing the "personal initiative and vision" of the author of the video. Nor does the Ministry explain who the author of the video was, what his relationship to the MoD or the Georgian government was, or why the MoD allowed a video that approvingly uses a quote by Hitler to be aired, or somehow missed its inclusion into the lineup.

Instead, the MoD has been defensive about the affair, pointing out the obvious -- that the issue has surfaced now in order to discredit the ministry --rather than clearly and definitively stating that the use of the quote in (at best) a semi-official setting was a horrific oversight and whoever was responsible should be distanced as far away as possible from official state structures. Greater transparency (and contrition) regarding this whole affair would seem to be vital components of a decisive rebuttal to the inevitable accusations of fascist sympathies that have arisen with it.

Selecting a CEC Chair: Why Am I Not Surprised?

2010-01-15T00:52:00.004-05:00

The holidays and a move to a new workplace have kept me offline these last few weeks, but I'm confident you all have have been keeping up with the lively (if anonymous) English-language commentary and reporting at the opposition Georgian International Media Centre.

And what a few weeks its been. This last month has seen a few positive developments: the public TV board getting 7 new members, including three supported by the independent Media Club and one affiliated with the parliamentary opposition, the new ombudsman issuing a self-consciously apolitical but earnest assessment of the state of human rights, and parliament legally alleviating a concern by the opposition that the ruling party was planning to register supporters outside of Tbilisi as city residents in an effort to inflate its share of the vote in upcoming local elections.

At the same time, we have also seen far more publicized developments: in addition to the end-of-year passage of the electoral law amendments, these have included the tragic disaster that resulted from the unexplainably hasty destruction of the WWII monument in Kutaisi; the strange claim by Imedi TV that 60% of poll respondents want Saakashvili to serve an unconstitutional third term (when, as Imedi also acknowledged, they evidently happened to only choose Saakashvili as the UNM's next presidential candidate); the government's fixation on re-introducing "military-patriotic education" and firearm skills to the public school system; the mixed verdicts delivered against defendants in the Mukhrovani coup trial; and, finally, the four-way game between the president, parliament, the nonparliamentary opposition, and the parliamentary opposition on selecting the chairman of the CEC -- turning what was supposed to be the core component of consensus building in advance of the local elections into a cause for further division and lack of trust.

For now, let's focus on the process for selecting the CEC chairman. To recall, the novelty of this process was that the president was going to select three candidates from a list of nominees proposed by various civil society representatives, and the opposition members of the CEC would select one by majority vote. In the end, most of the engaged civil society organizations threw their support behind one of two longtime election monitors (Eka Siradze and Kakhaber Sopromadze -- both, if I'm not mistaken, of ISFED, which suggests what exactly? A split in the election monitoring ranks, or a strategy to try and stack the deck in their candidates' favor?) Single NGOs selected other candidates, including the three that Saakashvili selected: the outgoing CEC chairman Levan Tarkhnishvili (nominated by the Liberty Institute, which should surely be considered more of a GONGO than an NGO at this point); constitutional court judge Otar Sichinava (sponsor: New Generation-New Initiative); and accountant, public TV board member, and former CEC-contracted monitor of campaign financing Zurab Kharatishvili (sponsor: Alpe Foundation).

The Georgian Media Centre has a good analysis of the predicament that the opposition has now found itself in, thanks to Saakashvili's choice of candidates. Opposition supporters focus on two issues. The first is the inclusion of outgoing CEC chairman Levan Tarkhnishvili as one of the president's three candidates. Whether out of pure cynicism, to reward Tarkhnishivili or other supporters within the government, and/or to force a choice between the other two candiates, Saakashvili did not do the process any justice by proposing a candidate he knew would be flatly rejected by virtually all civil society representatives and political parties. Keeping Tarkhnishvili on a list of candidates to a post from which he is clearly expected to step down has been a quite unfortunate signal of the lack of government commitment to a process of consensus-building in advance of local elections.

The other issue, of course, is Saakashvili's refusal to allow either of the two main NGO candidates to have the chance to be selected as CEC head. Now it's not self-evident that civil society actors -- no matter how respected and experienced in election monitoring they are -- should be expected to become the CEC chair, and perhaps the civil society groups that backed them should collectively have offered Saakashvili not individual candidates but a handful of acceptable nominees, allowing the president to make a choice among several. But regardless the outcome looks bad -- the government consults with civil society representatives and then ignores their preferences. The result? Opposition parties on the CEC are refusing to support any candidate, and it is now up to parliament to select the CEC head. It will be as if the hastily thrown together process of consensual selection never happened (the strangely codified legal timeline, Saakashvili's even stranger disruption of that timeline, and the differences this all suggests between the president and parliament are another story). The government's promise to consensually select a CEC head appears to have been for show, and it has managed to outmaneuver the opposition and civil society to select the CEC chairperson it probably always intended to. This does not mean that the conduct of the election must by necessity be poor, but it does demonstrate a spectacular lack of good faith on the part of the government and continues to breed distrust of the system among opposition supporters.

Unless this is all a farce to re-appoint Tarkhnishvili, salvaging the electoral process will depend heavily on the conduct of whoever is selected CEC chairman, be it Sichinava (reportedly Saakashvili's mother's neighbor, whatever that information is worth) or Kharatishvili. Not much appears to be known about either of them. Whichever of them is selected CEC head will have his work cut out if he hopes to gain the confidence of opposition parties and civil society.

UPDATE: So at least it wasn't a farce to re-elect Tarkhnishvili, who withdrew his candidacy (saying that he couldn't work with the opposition members of the CEC). Parliament chose Zurab Kharatishvili. Without knowing much about him, one could point out that having an accountant serve as CEC chairman happens to be a great idea -- there were certainly plenty of numerical errors made in at least the 2008 presidential election count. But its still not clear whether he has political, collegial, or personal ties that would diminish his ability to perform the abilities of the chairman in the spirit and letter of the law.

Local Elections 2010: Why Scrapping the Direct Election of the Tbilisi Mayor Would Be a Good Idea

2009-12-11T16:58:00.000-05:00

When is a compromise not a compromise? After parliament passed the first reading of the legislation to change the electoral code last Friday, government leaders sought to explain the rationale behind not only the 30% threshold for electing the mayor but their offer to have the Tbilisi mayor directly elected in the first place.

On the threshold, there's not a whole lot to add to this analysis of President Saakashvili's comments that a 50% threshold would cause a candidate to be elected by "hate votes." I'd only add that in one democratic system the UNM has seemed to admire -- Japanese democracy, where the ruling Liberal Democratic Party governed for nearly 55 years straight, with a 11-month break in the early 1990s -- the opposition Democratic Party of Japan swept to power earlier this year on the basis of what observers called "an act of political protest" ("It was as though an anti-LDP fever gripped the nation"). "Hate voting" happens.

More interesting have been the ruling party’s comments about the direct election of the mayor. Saakashvili says he had "lots of doubts" about a direct election. On Friday, parliamentary vice-speaker Mikheil Machavariani (UNM) said that "we have chosen the wrong way" in Tbilisi.

So why did they do it? Saakashvili says it was to reach "maximum consensus" with the opposition – in other words, that it was a compromise. Indeed, the opposition had sought direct elections of mayors back in 2005, in advance of 2006 local elections.

However, this was in the context of a new and unusual "winner-take-all" electoral code that was widely deemed as granting the ruling party an unfair advantage. It was in this context that the opposition did not support a new rule for the indirect election of mayors by the city councils – in and of itself, a democratic advance from appointed mayors.

The opposition also wasn't calling for the direct election of mayors earlier this year when the government made this "compromise" (though they didn't reject the idea too loudly either).

Now, with a 30% threshold looming, opposition leaders (at least those outside of parliament) aren't too happy about taking part in such a competition: the low bar coupled with the fact that so many opposition figures are planning to run for mayor appears to tilt the competition in favor of the incumbent. Moreover, mayoral candidates who lose may very well be institutionally shut out of politics in the short-term -- not as mayor and with no seat for themselves in the city council. Frankly, the opposition may be better off focusing their energies on securing their (probably large percentage of) seats in the city council.

Which brings me to my "politically incorrect" proposal: if the UNM agrees that the direct election of the mayor is not a good idea, and the pluralist nature of the opposition suggests they have better prospects in the city council race than in the mayoral race, why not scrap this so-called “compromise” of direct elections and allow the city council to elect the mayor?

In this case, the electoral code still needs to be modified along the lines that all parties have (more or less) agreed upon: a mixed single mandate/party list legislature of 50 seats and opposition roles in selecting the CEC chairperson and as commission secretaries. As well, legislation endorsed by the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association on limiting the use of administrative resources in the campaign appears to be getting discussed in parliament -- a desirable objective no matter what rules are finally established.

Most importantly, with such a system in place, the outcome will not be predictable. The UNM will receive a certain percentage of seats, the nonparliamentary opposition will receive their percentage, and the parliamentary opposition will receive theirs. None of these actors are likely to receive 50% of the vote on their own – the politics and coalition-building needed to elect a mayor would happen after the election.

Retreating from direct elections will be a significant reversal on the part of all parties, UNM and opposition alike. But if everyone agrees that it is in their interests, it will be an easy decision to make. Constituents are not going to care all that much. And a "grand compromise" like this would doubtlessly meet with a high level of approval among European and American democracy watchers.

It may seem obvious, but perhaps it is important to restate: Georgia's international friends place a tremendously high value on a democratic process in Georgia, but they really do not care who wins local elections. Supporting the establishment of electoral institutions that provide a "level playing field" for all actors is not some kind of code for supporting the opposition. A democratic election that returns the incumbents to power in Tbilisi and other municipalities will be welcomed and deemed just as legitimate as a democratic election that brings the opposition to power. The goal is to support an electoral system that makes it maximally uncertain who will win.

Local Elections 2010: Is 6 Months Enough Time?

2009-12-04T14:31:00.001-05:00

This week, parliament began procedures to amend the constitution to allow for early local elections. Less than six months before the elections are to be held, neither the mechanism for setting the date nor the electoral code itself are in place. And the constitution is unfortunately being used again as a completely malleable political instrument -- such frequent changes to the constitution undermine the notion that law should prevail above short-term political interest, whether intentions are good or bad. The only thing that might change my mind in this particular case is if the amendment actually provides long-term institutional flexibility, rather than simply enables elections to be held early this year. I haven't seen the text, so I don't know.

I still think it would be best to hold local elections at their scheduled time. There is no sound reason for early elections, other than inertia (the ruling party proposed the early date as a compromise to the opposition days before rallies began in April, even though such a proposal was not on the agenda). Among parties planning to participate, there seems to be no dissent against early elections, but I think its still worth proposing to hold them at their scheduled time.

If spring elections are inevitable, efforts have to be focused on making them as healthy as possible. The first issue is a cautionary one I've mentioned before -- the law as the draft stands will allow the president to announce the date of the election 45 days in advance but no later than June 1, 2010. This flexibility should not be used to the UNM's political advantage (as it was in 2006 local elections). The president should publicly commit as soon as possible, even if it is not yet possible to do so in law, to the May 30 date everyone assumes will be the date the election is to be held.

The second issue concerns, again, the threshold. I still firmly believe a threshold higher than 30% will grant far greater confidence about the outcome of the mayoral election. Whatever the decision, however, the electoral code must also clearly proscribe the extralegal use of administrative resources and provide for an acceptable appeals process -- in ways that have the confidence of a wide spectrum of parties, NGOs, and international organizations. There are multiple points of view regarding the threshold: my main concern is whether the ruling party has the ability -- legally or otherwise -- to manipulate the outcome, in advance using the powers and resources of the incumbency in ways considered illegitimate in healthy democracies or on election day itself. It is one thing if the UNM's candidate (reportedly acknowledged to be incumbent Gigi Ugulava) could genuinely obtain a 30% victory in a free and fair election (not ideal from the point of view of legitimacy, but still democratic). It is another thing if the UNM's candidate could only really obtain 29% of the vote but through various illicit means proclaims victory.

Finally, though at this point the matter seems moot, I still think the direct election of the Tbilisi mayor was not only unnecessary (and possibly counterproductive) for advancing Georgian democracy, it was something that, strategically, opposition parties should not have accepted. Given the fractured nature of the opposition, they would probably have a better shot at securing control of the mayor's office if they had focused their attention on getting a majority of seats in a directly-elected city council that would itself select a mayor (this was an important democratic change to the law already in advance of the 2006 local elections, one now fated to have been relevant for a single election). Now, the race for the Tbilisi city council has become relatively less important, when this is a body that provides an excellent opportunity to seed both a multiparty democratic system and the deepening of legislative power, both features that could usefully be extended to the national parliament in anticipation of 2012 elections.

Comment below or write democraticgeorgia@gmail.com

Local Elections 2010 (III)

2009-11-25T14:42:00.003-05:00

So the UNM is sticking to its position that the mayor of Tbilisi should be elected with a 30% threshold, with party leaders intent on moving discussion away from the interparty working group to parliament.

First, let's tackle the question of compromise, which I still believe is the critical aspect to electoral code reform, moreso than the substance of the compromise itself. Defending the UNM's decision to cut short the working group discussions, MP Akaki Minashvili (ex-director of the Liberty Institute NGO and a former Kmara youth movement leader) argued that the threshold dispute should not be taken in isolation. The ruling party has already compromised by agreeing to an expansion of the Tbilisi city council with new election rules (25 party-list, 25 single mandate), something which increases the likelihood that more parties will be represented in the city council, and selection of the CEC chairperson by opposition CEC members (out of a list of 3 nominated by the president). Given such concessions, Minashvili says, the Alliance should reciprocate by accepting the proposed 30% threshold.

To this point, I could add that a 30% threshold is more consistent with the compromise rule parties have provisionally agreed upon for the election of city council deputies, who are to be elected by a simple plurality. If city deputies are to have limited political (as opposed to administrative/legal) legitimacy by virtue of this low bar, why should the mayor have so much more?

On the other hand, this is why a 40% threshold still seems to me a reasonable compromise between two politically-motivated positions. The other compromises are theoretically neutral (the first, definitely; the second, presumably, but what if the president proposes 3 obviously unacceptable candidates?). On the threshold, however, the UNM presumably supports 30% because it believes its candidate has a good chance to win outright with 30% of the vote, especially in a multi-candidate contest. (Any new public opinion polls on this?)

It appears, however, that another UNM objection to a high threshold is along the lines of the point I made earlier -- that a 50% threshold will become a political tool in the hands of a victorious opposition. The UNM does not to want to risk a scenario by which an opposition candidate wins the mayoral election with a majority vote and proceeds to use his/her popular mandate as a vehicle to try and unseat the ruling party in contentious ways rather than focusing on properly governing Tbilisi.

How exactly this might happen is worth speculating upon. In the runup to national elections, would an opposition-run City Hall condone or facilitate the kind of mass protests that are now illegal (more on that timely issue in a future post), or at least refuse to implement the recently-amended law on assembly, potentially creating a "revolutionary" situation of dual power between city and national governments? Will it foster and use its own administrative resources to help steer the vote in national elections? Will it seek to create an atmosphere of crisis in an effort to demonstrate that the ruling party has lost its ability to govern?

Theoretically, all these outcomes are possible, especially considering the opposition's efforts to foster a revolutionary environment on the streets of Tbilisi last summer. However, its not clear, first of all, that a 30% threshold would somehow dampen the efforts of a victorious Tbilisi mayor who was already inclined toward radicalizing the post. Second, likely opposition mayoral candidates are hardly all in the "radical" camp; it is hard to imagine someone like Irakly Alasania, the most viable nonparliamentary opposition candidate participating in the working group, using his post to destabilize the situation "from within."

In the end, perhaps there would be a risk of confrontation between the Tbilisi and national authorities -- even one that in the context of future mass protests dangerously raises the question of who has the right to control the streets. However, that's a challenge democratic state-building ought to willingly grapple with, isn't it? Not one it should seek to avoid.

I'm still not convinced that the direct election of the Tbilisi mayor is necessary or desirable -- the current system, introduced in 2006, provides for mayors that are indirectly elected by city councils. This was undeniably a democratic advance from the old system of appointed mayors, and there's a lot going for this system in the evolving Georgian context. Moreover, if this rule is going to stay in place for the rest of Georgia's city elections, its not at all clear why the Tbilisi election rules should diverge.

Perhaps more on that in another post, as well as some thoughts on the amended law on protests and its recent utilization (or mis-utilization?) in the case of the three demonstrators in front of parliament.

P.S. As I've mentioned before, I invite comments -- not only publicly but by email at democraticgeorgia@gmail.com. If you email me, please specify whether you want me to directly post your comments (attributing you or, by my judgment, anonymously) or whether you just want to offer corrections/clarifications/thoughts to incorporate as I see fit (without attribution). Either form is perfectly welcome. I recognize that many informed readers may not want or be able to post public comments.

Local Elections 2010 (II)

2009-11-19T12:51:00.006-05:00

The news that the multiparty working group on the election code has failed to reach an agreement on new local election rules is discouraging. Not because participants could not reach a consensus, but because of the suggestion by MP Pavle Kublashvili (UNM) that the working group format has exhausted itself.

The point of the working group is to enable a compromise to be reached, not simply engage in the process of dialogue just to toss the format aside at the first suggestion that participants cannot agree. The working group should not be set aside, even if the consequence is to push back the election date to give participants time to reach an agreement (which, actually, I don't believe is that negative a consequence).

The good news is that participants appear to have (largely) agreed on 2 of the 3 main elements of a revised code: a 50-seat party list/majoritarian system for the Tbilisi city council and a major role for opposition parties in selecting the CEC chairman. This consensus is welcome and impressive. [NOTE: Details are in this statement by the Alliance for Georgia.]

The sticking point is the percentage needed for a first-round victory in the direct election of the Tbilisi mayor (which I'll have more to say about in my next post). The government and the main parliamentary opposition (Christian Democrats) support a 30% threshold while the main nonparliamentary opposition in the working group (Alliance for Georgia) seeks 50% , but expresses a willingness to go lower.

First of all, let's take the question of compromise -- the reason for the working group in the first place (and something that should be a major objective of any democracy promotion policy in Georgia). The ruling party says that 30% is their compromise figure, since they originally wanted no threshold at all.

This is not really so convincing. The government's starting point for negotiation should be the existing institutional framework that they have perpetuated and developed. The relevant existing rules are: a) majoritarian "block" deputies of the city council are elected with 30% of the vote; b) the mayor is elected by the city council with a simple majority; and c) majoritarian deputies in the national parliament are elected with 30% of the vote (see the election code and the law on the capital city -- here are the relevant draft amendments).

All together, this strongly suggests that at least 30% should be considered the government's starting point for negotiation. A simple plurality has never been (to my knowledge) an element of the electoral rules at either national or local government levels. Moreover, given the importance of a directly elected mayor, it would seem that the baseline should be at least as high as that for city council members and parliamentarians.

So the government (and CDM, for reasons that remain opaque) support 30%. Alliance for Georgia supports 50%. One can only deduce that a reasonable compromise is 40%.

In support of such a compromise, a quick canvas through democratic Eastern Europe suggests that only Albania and Ukraine have lower thresholds for mayoral elections (they both have simple plurality rules). The rest require a 50% victory or indirectly elect their mayors through city councils. [CORRECTION: As MP David Darchiashvili points out in a comment below, systems are more diverse than I thought. Hungary, Slovakia, and Bosnia also have plurality-based mayoral elections, so institutionally a 30% threshold is not so out of line.] And 40%, while unconventional~~on the low end~~, is not unprecedented: at least two U.S. cities, Albuquerque, New Mexico and Berkeley, California, have 40% thresholds for victory in direct mayoral elections (as does New York City's mayoral election primaries) [Thanks to Georgetown grad student Dave Lonardo for that].

Finally, aside from its virtue as a compromise, in the Georgian context, a threshold that is lower than 50% makes some sense. Whether the victor is from the opposition or the ruling party, he or she will become a serious contender for the presidency. A 50% victory would grant the new mayor enormous popular legitimacy. Obviously the ruling party doesn't want an opposition mayor to have such a mandate in the leadup to presidential elections -- better they win in Tbilisi with 31% of the vote than with 51% -- but it also may not want their own candidate to have such legitimacy either! The jockeying for position to be the UNM's presidential candidate has barely begun; a majority-elected UNM mayor would virtually preempt that contest. And in general, its not clear that what Georgian democracy needs is a more individual-based political system regardless of who wins the mayoral election.

Even so, 30% is too low to build confidence. Besides the fact that the nonparliamentary opposition thinks it too low, there are too many concerns about the "imbalance" of (administrative) resources and their potential misuse giving an unfair structural advantage to the ruling party's candidate. Michael Posner, US assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, suggested in Tbilisi the other day that it was important that a "level playing field" be established for the local elections. Its not clear that a 30% threshold does that.

The electoral working group should not be thrown away. A compromise consensus on the threshold should be established.

Local Elections 2010 (I)

2009-11-17T23:41:00.005-05:00

Local elections are to be held next year, tentatively on 30 May, and negotiations regarding new electoral rules are underway. Local elections are not only important for their contribution (at least in principle) to local government, they are also a dress rehearsal for the 2012 and 2013 parliamentary and presidential elections. The electoral campaign, election day, and the postelectoral count and handling of appeals will all be indications of government and political party commitment to democratic practices. No less significantly, local elections -- particularly for the Tbilisi city council and mayoral races -- will define many of the leading actors in the next national elections.

There are a few pressing issues. The first -- which I'm surprised has received so little attention -- is the matter of officially setting an election date. Local elections were supposed to be held in the fall, but as a concession to opposition parties, the government offered to hold early elections in the spring (30 May, just over six months from now). However, no date has been officially fixed. According to the electoral code, the date of an early local government election is tied to the date that local government bodies will be dissolved. In principle, this means that the president can keep opposition parties guessing as to the official date of elections by announcing a snap dissolution and -- as mandated by law -- schedule new elections within 45 days, leaving parties (and election administrations and monitors) little time to prepare. There is a precedent for this kind of politics -- in the 2006 elections, the government took full advantage of its right to set the date of local elections just 40 days in advance. If the government is committed to holding local elections on 30 May, a more formal declaration is in order.

Personally, I'm not convinced that moving the schedule up for local elections is really that useful an idea (and at the time it wasn't really taken to be much of a compromise). The "Code of Good Practice" of the Council of Europe's Venice Commission suggests that no amendments to electoral laws should be introduced within one year of an election. Given the extensive reworking of local election rules that is underway, a 12-month period is probably appropriate. Still, none of the parties that plan to participate in local elections appear to object so far to the early date.

Getting Started

2009-11-13T15:54:00.001-05:00

What needs to be done to improve Georgian democracy? An array of institutions require continuing attention. Main areas of focus include the constitution and electoral legislation; the judiciary and interior ministry; and media. All these areas have been subjects of discussion since the first days after the Rose Revolution, six years ago.

The government's forcible dispersal of protestors in November 2007 led to heightened attention to the shortcomings of Georgia's democratic system. Since then, and especially after the August 2008 war, the government of Georgia began acknowledging the need to implement a "new wave" of democratic reforms. While reforms have been implemented or initiated in a number of spheres, and promises for further reforms have been made, much more work remains.

For a recent survey of the "second wave" of democratic reform, see Transparency International Georgia's September 2009 report, "Reform or Retouch? Georgia's 'New Wave' of Democracy". Also see the collection of articles in Spotlight on Georgia (ed. Adam Hug of the UK's Foreign Policy Centre).

A detailed analysis of Georgian politics and institutional reform since the November 2007 crisis can be found in my article, "Still Staging Democracy: Contestation and Conciliation in Postwar Georgia" (Demokratizatsiya, Summer 2009). Svante Cornell and Niklas Nillson provide a more concise treatment of the subject in the same journal. Other valuable recent articles include "Georgia's Year of Turmoil" by Miriam Lanskoy (National Endowment for Democracy) and Giorgi Areshidze (Journal of Democracy, October 2008), and "Compromising Democracy: State Building in Saakashvili's Georgia" (Central Asian Survey, June 2009) by Lincoln Mitchell. An early critique of the post-Rose Revolutionary constitutional reforms by Irakly Areshidze is here. Areshidze and Mitchell also have book-length treatments of Georgian politics that are indispensable reads.

Democratic Georgia

2009-10-30T16:43:00.005-04:00

I'm starting this blog as a way to help contribute to the efforts of those in Georgian government structures, political parties, and civil society, as well as in the international diplomatic and development communities, who are working to implement democratic institutional reforms in Georgia. Georgian democracy is a work in progress, and continued reforms are vital if Georgia hopes to stay on a path that leads to further integration into European and Euro-Atlantic communities of nations.

Georgia's devastating war with Russia led to a new, existential, sense of insecurity. Russia militarily occupied South Ossetia and Abkhazia (at the behest of local leaderships), built new bases and border patrols, expanded into territories and districts formerly under Georgian control, and positioned its forces in strategic locations kilometers away from Tbilisi and from Georgia's main east-west artery.

The well-meaning insistence of U.S. policymakers that the United States will never recognize South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence misses the point. Georgian insecurity has far more to do with the return of the Russian military presence to Georgia, less than one year after it was voluntarily withdrawn; the de facto Russian annexation of its internationally recognized territory, particularly in South Ossetia; and the opacity of future Russian intentions toward Georgia as a state.

Under such circumstances, it should be no surprise that democracy-building might run into some difficulties. But a bitterly-divided body politic; a lack of trust and transparency among political forces, between state and society, and within governing institutions; and a lack of consensus regarding the fundamental rules of the political game all do more to further imperil Georgian security and, conceivably, its statehood.

Moreover, with Europe and the United States having lost (at least for the time being) whatever appetite they may have earlier had to bring Georgia briskly toward NATO, or in any way to play a serious role in its security architecture, Georgia's hope for deeper European and transatlantic engagement lies solely with its ability to democratize -- genuinely, in multiple spheres, and in multiparty fashion -- in other words, its ability to indisputably become Europe's newest democracy.