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.