On 28 December, the opposition United National Movement party (UNM) elected Nikanor Melia as the new chairman of the party, following the resignation of Grigol Vashadze (Caucasus Watch reported).

Prior to Melia’s election a remote vote took place within the UNM. Melia received 13,491 (64.9%) of the votes in comparison to his main rival Levan Varshalomidze, who only received  7,288 votes (35.1%). Addressing the party congress, Melia said that the UNM “aims to take responsibility again and create a rich, western-style Georgia, where human freedom, happiness and prosperity represent the main values.” He also presented a plan for promoting citizen participation in the UNM party activities, including, among others, supporting “interesting” public initiatives and introducing a model of public party finance. 

The founder and Prime Minister candidate of the UNM Mikheil Saakashvili congratulated Melia on his new appointment. According to Saakashvili, Melia is a symbol of perseverance, courage and self-sacrifice. “After removing usurpers from power, the Georgian people will make all major decisions electronically. Georgians around the world will decide their homeland’s fate,” Saakashvili announced.

Other changes within the Georgian opposition parties were also reported in recent days. One of the leaders of European Georgia (EG) Elene Khoshtaria announced that she would leave the party. She stated that she plans to start an independent political life at this stage, adding that she has not joined any other party nor plans to enter Parliament.

The former leader of the libertarian Girchi party Zurab Japaridze launched the More Freedom-Girchi party, following controversies with several fellow party members (Caucasus Watch reported). Japaridze said that the new party will differ from the previous party significantly. “I want the new Girchi to be a more open platform. These people have a lot of ideas and initiatives… Not all of them might succeed but let the Girchi supporters decide who does it better,” he said.

It was also reported that the head of the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED) Elene Nizharadze has resigned following a mistake in ISFED’s parallel vote count data (Caucasus Watch reported). ISFED board members said that Nizharadze’s resignation came after consultations and a broad consensus in the NGO. They said that the mistake in the data was not Nizharadze’s fault. However, there were errors in the communication process after the mistake was found. Nizharadze stated that leaving the post was not a problem for her if the step helps ISFED regain its reputation. She said that the parallel vote count software which was used by ISFED was based on the Serbian software system where invalid ballot papers were also counted.  

Transparency International (TI) Georgia released its final report regarding the elections in the country that took place on 31 October. The report emphasised that police had launched investigations into 59 election violence cases, of which 6 were terminated and 53 are still ongoing. However, the watchdog said that the Interior Ministry has since not released updated statistics on ongoing investigations. The watchdog also stated that the country’s Prosecutor’s Office was used to discredit the former ruling UNM party. According to the watchdog, the pre-election context, signs of selective approach in investigations and “populist statements made by the ruling party leaders violating the presumption of innocence.” 

TI Georgia also argued “there was a tendency to use several types of institutional administrative resources,” including the use of state-funded projects for election campaigning, mobilisation of public servants, and alleged cases of illegal campaigning. Highlighting that the ruling party presented “up to 20 socio-economic initiatives” as part of its Covid-19 economic response plan, the watchdog said several of these initiatives “could be categorised as electorally motivated public spending.”