Georgia voted on Monday in parliamentary polls that pit President Mikheil Saakashvili’s party against a billionaire tycoon who poses the first big challenge to his rule and has warned of mass protests if the elections are rigged. The showdown between Saakashvili’s party and an opposition coalition led by Bidzina Ivanishvili has turned increasingly bitter after a scandal over torture in prisons sparked protests across the ex-Soviet state. Ivanishvili has threatened mass protests if Western observers don’t declare a fair vote and his Georgian Dream bloc mobilised tens of thousands of supporters at the weekend for one of the biggest rallies Tbilisi has ever seen. “It is a day of historic importance for Georgia. The fate of the Georgian state is being decided,” Saakashvili, whose campaign was hurt by the prison abuse scandal, said after casting his ballot in Tbilisi. Ivanishvili said the elections would give Georgia a new government despite his concerns that they were being rigged in favour of the ruling party. “For the first time Georgians are making a ‘nearly’ democratic choice. I say ‘nearly’ because the authorities have already committed lots of violations,” he said outside a polling station in Tbilisi. The highly-polarised campaign in the country of 4.5 million people, described by OSCE election monitors as “confrontational and rough”, has raised fears of post-poll unrest.
