Popular Force movement: US Embassy “cannot get used” to sovereign Georgian Gov’t that “does not push country towards war”

Popular Force, a newly launched public movement composed of the former ruling Georgian Dream party MPs who exited the team in June, on Friday released a statement saying the United States Embassy “cannot get used” to a sovereign Georgian Government that “does not push the country towards war” amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The statement by the MPs was made in response to remarks from US Ambassador Kelly Degnan, who on Thursday vowed support for the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy, a Georgian-based election watchdog, by saying it was a “highly respected” and experienced election monitoring organisation.

The Embassy cannot get used to a sovereign Georgian government that does not push the country towards war. We have no doubt that the Embassy will do everything possible to overthrow such a government, and will even go to much more severe measures than rigging a parallel vote tabulation. However, we are sure that the power of the people equipped with the truth will firmly protect the country's sovereignty and will not give anyone the opportunity to bring chaos to the country and drag it into war”, the statement said.

The statement also responded to Degnan’s remarks who had noted that the parallel vote tabulation miscalculation by the election watchdog during the 2020 Parliamentary elections in the country was a “statistically insignificant factor”.

As for the ‘statistically insignificant factor’ - parallel vote tabulation had a margin of error of 0.7 percent, according to the ISFED methodology. This means that the difference between the official election results and the parallel vote tabulation results should not have been more than 0.7 percent. However, there was a 2.4 percent difference between the Central Election Commission figures and the parallel vote tabulation data”, the MPs said.

The authors of the statement also stressed that the 2.4 percent margin of error had been used by the domestic “radical opposition” and NGOs for “claims about rigged elections”, before it was “eventually revealed that it was the parallel vote tabulation that had been rigged, and not the elections”.

Degnan called the rigging of the parallel vote tabulation an ‘insignificant statistical error’ and said the error had been identified by ISFED soon after. The public knows very well that these are the biggest lies. In addition, it is impossible for the Ambassador not to have information about this and to lie unintentionally”, the statement noted.

The MPs also commented on Degnan’s remarks who said that “the assessments that were made by ODIHR, OSCE, and the international and domestic election monitors for the 2020 and 2021 elections pointed to serious violations: voter intimidation, vote buying, carousel voting, abuse of administrative resources, and other violations that occurred in the weeks leading up to the election as well as on election day”. 

All these topics were thoroughly examined by the Parliamentary Commission. The heads of the monitoring NGOs were interviewed in detail. Finally, it was determined that none of the monitoring organisations had any solid facts about voter intimidation, vote buying or systematic use of administrative resources”, MPs noted.

“The Ambassador should know very well that the OSCE/ODIHR and all other international monitoring organisations assessed both the 2020 and 2021 elections as ‘free and competitive, in which fundamental human rights were protected’, which is synonymous with fairness of the elections”, the statement said.

The group of lawmakers also criticised Degnan for “repeating the talking points” of the United National Movement opposition party.

When the Ambassador repeats a message released by the United National Movement party, which has already been neutralised many times with arguments, it can be seen that artificially forming a perception of illegitimacy of the Government, and [creating] a revolutionary mood is a goal in itself for her”, they concluded.