Georgia (Sakartvelo)

Mikheil Saakashvili, the pro-Western president of Georgia faced with increasing protests among his people, conceded defeat Tuesday after preliminary election returns showed the opposition had won control of parliament and the right to name a powerful new prime minister. In a televised address, the 44-year-old leader acknowledged that the Georgian Dream coalition led by tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili had won, and said his own United National Movement would become the opposition. ”You know well that the views of this coalition were and still remain fundamentally unacceptable for me,” he said, “but democracy works in a way that allows the Georgian people to make a decision by a majority.” With nearly half the ballots counted by Tuesday afternoon, the Central Election Commission reported that Georgian Dream had 54.1% of the vote to 41% for Saakashvili’s movement.

More than two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Republic of Georgia passed an important democratic milestone this week when the opposition party won the  parliamentary elections and the incumbent president, Mikheil Saakashvili, conceded defeat.  The door is now open for the first peaceful transition of power in modern Georgia’s history. The development is also a landmark for the Eurasian region of former Soviet Republics, where most elections have been rigged and often violent. …  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty-one years ago, the fifteen former Soviet Republics have followed mostly bumpy paths toward and away from democracy. On Monday, Georgians stunned the world when an opposition coalition led by eccentric billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili won the parliamentary election there. President Mikheil Saakashvili conceded defeat on Tuesday, paving the way for Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream bloc to form a new government. When Ivanishvili becomes prime minister, as expected, it will be the first time in Georgia’s history that the government will have changed at the ballot box rather than through revolution.

One of the world’s richest businessmen claimed to have inflicted a surprise narrow defeat on the incumbent pro-Western party in Monday’s elections in Georgia, a key ally of the United States neighboring Russia. Billionaire tycoon-turned-politician Bidzina Ivanishvili claimed his opposition political alliance Georgian Dream had staged a remarkable upset and was heading for control of the former Soviet republic’s parliament. However, incumbent President Mikheil Saakashvili insisted his United National Movement was on course to retain power.