The Georgian Parliament Speaker, Shalva Papuashvili, on Monday cast doubt on the reasons given by the OSCE/ODIHR for refusing to observe Georgia’s upcoming local elections, calling the explanation “hard to believe”.

“This is another example of the hypocrisy we see from abroad. The letter is a document — they cannot hide the dates. They claim they didn’t have time, yet we had a month of election campaigning in September. How hard would it have been to gather a few people and bring them to Georgia? The reasons they give are hard to believe: they received an invitation a month before the 2008 presidential election and came. Their current excuses are transparently false. Georgian society should remember this.

Those who now claim to have observed the 2024 elections — what does that prove? It’s on paper. For those who don’t grasp the written record, the head of the mission said orally that Georgia has an elected government and that elections took place. Last September, the opposition had no complaints; only in the days that followed did they invent reasons — sometimes alleging leaks, sometimes claiming duplicate ID use, sometimes invoking fantastical numbers. Their complaints focus on election day itself.

If they had truly observed the process, they would not have found grounds to raise objections; the conclusion would have been positive, so they refused.

As for the embassies that now remain silent: if they fail to speak up, then the day after the elections some will claim the vote was not inclusive,” he wrote.