Federalists’ Chergoleishvili: What won Magyar his election is already written into our nine-party strategic agreement

“The very strategy that delivered victory to Magyar has already been enshrined in the strategic agreement signed by nine opposition parties. A new government will inevitably be elected through the ballot box, but only after the current regime has been defeated beforehand, and only after the opposition has secured such an overwhelming advantage ahead of polling day that the regime will have no means of falsifying the result,” declared Tamar Chergoleishvili, Chair of the Federalists party, speaking on a PalitraNews programme.

According to Chergoleishvili, the change that has taken place in Hungary is, first and foremost, good for Georgia’s national interests.

“For us, for the Federalists, this victory is a source of particular joy, because what we have been arguing for many years, and for which I have personally been made a target of hatred by the political bubble, has been proved exactly right. We have always maintained that in an autocracy, you cannot win an election on a simple majority. To win an election under an autocratic system and then actually defend those votes, you need not merely a few percentage points’ advantage, you need a majority twice the size. Hungary, after all, is still a country with at least some semblance of democracy, whereas here an entrenched autocratic system has been firmly established.

Beyond that, the issue over which I remain in conflict to this day, with sections of the media and with our political surroundings alike, is that we must be speaking about the things that touch people’s vital interests. The opposition alliance’s strategic agreement addresses precisely this: that a critical majority must see a genuine stake in changing the regime, not merely a slim majority, but an overwhelming one. That was the root of my quarrel with much of the political spectrum: we had to speak about the issues that directly concern ordinary citizens, so that those people could see their own interests reflected in our agenda.

Instead, Georgian opposition politics was consumed by questions such as what was troubling Misha, what Kezera wanted, whether to prop up Melia here or nudge Khabeishvili there, political manoeuvring and nothing more.

I am glad that we managed to broaden the consensus on this point. Today, a significant part of the Georgian opposition agrees: entering elections on a simple majority is pointless, as they will steal our result, and we will be powerless to defend the votes,” Tamar Chergoleishvili has said.