Georgian parliamentary parties support rejection of majority elections

The Georgian parliamentary parties have supported the proposal of the non-parliamentary opposition to reform the electoral legislation and abolish the parliamentary elections by the majority system.

The inter-party working group of the non-parliamentary opposition submitted its proposals to improve the electoral legislation to the chairman of the Georgian Parliament in late December. Members of the group expect that by the spring of 2015 the work on the proposals will be over.

Zurab Abashidze, the vice-speaker of the parliament from the opposition party "Free Democrats" and a majority MP from the Samgori constituency of Tbilisi, said that one of the drawbacks of the current system is in different number of voters in the majority of districts.

For example, as he said, the Kutaisi constituency has registered more than 158,000 voters, while the Kazbegi one has a little more than 5000 voters.

In his turn, Vakhtang Khmaladze, the chairman of the legal committee of the parliament and a majority MP from the Didube constituency of Tbilisi, has treated the majority system as the worst of all existing ones. Under the majority system, in a single-mandate constituency, there is a probability that all the mandates may be won by one political force, he said.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.