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GEORGIA: POLITICAL PARTIES BEFORE AND AFTER THE ROSE REVOLUTION
Ekaterine GAKHOKIDZE
Ekaterine Gakhokidze, Ph.D. (Political Science), assistant professor, Department of Political Science, Tbilisi State University (Tbilisi, Georgia)
The country is heading toward democracy and busy consolidating its institutions, so it is paying particular attention to fair and legitimate elections and encouraging the appearance of strong political parties as one of the guarantors of democracy and stability. Indeed, an election is a political procedure which allows a nation to ensure a peaceful transition of power and mobilize its citizens. It allows the voters and political forces to use their constitutional right to take part in the country’s political life. At times, these forces fail to recognize their responsibility to the voters. As a result, an increasingly larger share of the country’s population is becoming disillusioned by representative democracy and elections as its political institution. It often happens that far from creating public harmony, elections generate even wider political gaps or even sharper social conflicts. This was vividly demonstrated by the Rose Revolution, a direct response to the massive falsifications of the parliamentary elections of 2 November, 2003. The mass actions forced President Shevardnadze to resign before his term in office expired. But very soon after that the crisis was resolved and events developed in compliance with the constitution. And great efforts were made to carry out democratic elections. Yet it is too early to say that we have achieved stability in our election and political system.
It should be mentioned that, along with the parties which accumulated vast experience of political struggle in the wake of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, new political structures (or rather political clubs with no clear political platforms and no particular skills for active involvement in politics) appeared in Georgia. Some of the relatively stable parties are…………………
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