[ad_1]
Former French diplomat Salome Zurabishvili took the lead in the presidential election in Georgia, considered a crucial test for the increasingly unpopular ruling party, revealed preliminary results on Monday.
Zurabishvili, backed by the ruling Georgian ruling party, won 43.59 percent of the vote, compared to 34.83 percent for opposition leader Grigol Vashadze, the central election commission said.
A candidate must receive 50% of the vote plus one vote to be elected in the first round. The vote should take place before 1 December, the commission said.
The participation rate was nearly 47% at 18:00 local time (16:00 GMT) Sunday, at the closing of the polls, the commission added.
The presidential campaign saw the ruling party and the opposition sit back and prelude their deadlock in the parliamentary polls scheduled for 2020.
If elected, Vashadze promised to run a campaign for early parliamentary elections.
– rival diplomats –
Zurabishvili, an elegant 66-year-old independent MP, is the daughter of refugees who fled Georgia in 1921 to Paris after the country was annexed by the Red Army.
His career in the Foreign Service of France ended with an assignment in Tbilisi.
At the time, President Mikheil Saakashvili appointed his foreign minister, with the approval of then French President Jacques Chirac.
But Zurabishvili quickly made enemies of the parliamentary majority, deputies and senior diplomats publicly accusing him of arrogance and impulsivity.
She was fired after a year of work but thousands of people took to the streets of the capital to protest against her dismissal.
She then joined the opposition and became one of Saakashvili's fiercest critics.
His main rival, Vashadze – supported by the exiled UN National Movement (UNM) of Saakashvili and 10 other groups – has been bolstered by growing popular discontent with the government's inability to fight poverty.
A respected career diplomat, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Soviet Union, where he contributed to the drafting of the US-Soviet Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Weapons. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saakashvili from 2008 to 2012.
Vashadze, 60, is married to the famous ballerina Nina Ananiashvili.
– Last direct ballot –
Both candidates promised to bring Georgia closer to full membership of the European Union and NATO.
The small Black Sea nation has been knocking on NATO's doorstep for more than a decade, but the bloc has not yet put Tbilisi on the path to a formal membership despite the 2008 commitment to admit it.
During a difficult campaign, Vashadze criticized the "informal government of the oligarchs" of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire leader of the Georgian dream.
Ivanishvili, Georgia's richest man, stepped down as prime minister in 2013 after only one year in office, but he is widely regarded as the de facto leader of the country.
During the election campaign, Zurabishvili and Georgian Dream criticized the UNM for alleged human rights violations during his previous term.
The vote will be the last direct presidential election in Georgia at the time of the transition to a parliamentary regime.
The new head of state will be a predominantly ceremonial figure. His successor will be elected in 2024 by an electoral college of 300 members.
More than 3.5 million people were eligible to vote in elections, which were monitored by international observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The hotly contested race pits ex-French ambassador and former Georgian Foreign Minister Salome Zourabishvili against opposition leader Grigol Vashadze.
Grigol Vashadze is a respected career diplomat who worked at the Foreign Ministry of the Soviet Union, where he contributed to the drafting of the Soviet-American Treaty on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Weapons.
The ruling party and opposition groups see the presidential campaign as a prelude to the crucial parliamentary elections scheduled for 2020
