Activists “nominate” sheep for mayoral candidate in Georgian city

Georgia is in a bustle over the upcoming election of its municipal government officials and some activists are using sarcasm to express their political stance.

A group of activists in the eastern Georgian city of Telavi have presented a sheep as their mayoral candidate.

Of course, they could not legally nominate an animal for the election, so they held an official presentation during which they wore t-shirts with a picture of a sheep and their slogan, and then encouraged people arriving at voting stations to write the word "sheep” under the list of official candidates and circle it.

Watch the presentation below.

The purpose of this act was to stress that the activists think it does not really matter who the mayor will be because the central government controls everything anyway.

"The reality is that in fact, we do not have self-governance and it seems like that we will not have it for a long time. That is why we think that it does not really matter who will represent the municipal government in Telavi because the central government sees the local government and people as sheep”, one of the activists said.

The activists stressed that they were against removing the status of a self-governing city from Telavi and the city government had acted like sheep when they voted in favour of this decision.

The recent decision means that several municipalities across Georgia will be merged, resulting in seven cities losing the status of ‘self-governing city’.

The Municipal Elections of 2017 are scheduled to take place on October 21. On that day, Georgian citizens will elect 2,058 members of 64 city councils and 64 municipal mayors.