By ANDREW E. KRAMER
Published: January 7, 2008
TBILISI, Georgia — Georgia’s pro-Western president narrowly won re-election over the weekend, according to official results released Sunday, but the main opposition candidate contested the outcome.
With returns from nearly all precincts in Saturday’s vote counted, President Mikheil Saakashvili had received 52.8 percent, according to the Central Election Commission, a slim majority that would allow him to avoid a runoff. The main opposition candidate, Levan Gachechiladze, received 27 percent.
But the outcome was not as clean as the government had hoped for in November when Mr. Saakashvili called early elections and declared a state of emergency to deal with antigovernment protests. On Sunday, Mr. Gachechiladze said fraud had tainted the results, and by late in the day he had not conceded.
Mr. Gachechiladze said a second round of voting should be held and called for street protests. He told several thousand supporters at a rally in Tbilisi on Sunday, “We have won despite pressure, despite intimidation, despite televised terror exerted against us.”
The demonstration, which was peaceful, dispersed by early afternoon as Orthodox Christians, the majority of Georgians, began celebrating their Christmas Eve.
Supporters of Mr. Saakashvili, an American-educated leader close to the Bush administration, had already claimed victory based on exit polling on Saturday.
A statement by the international observer mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe called the vote “in essence consistent with most O.S.C.E. and Council of Europe commitments and standards for democratic elections,” but noted violations.
Observers said they recorded cases of the same individuals voting more than once at 12 polling stations, according to the statement, and said ballot boxes in 3 percent of the precincts they visited had not been properly sealed.
At a news conference in Tbilisi on Sunday, Alcee L. Hastings, a Democratic congressman from Florida and the coordinator of the O.S.C.E. mission, declined to say whether voting irregularities were significant enough to reverse Mr. Saakashvili’s slender margin.
In response to the report, Giorgi Kandelaki, a spokesman for the Justice Ministry, said, “To our knowledge, there were very few violations that could be regarded as serious.”
The perception of a fair vote was important because the Bush administration has cited Mr. Saakashvili’s government as an example of democratic success in a region where democracy has been scarce.
Georgia is also valuable to Washington because it is an ally in the Iraq war. With 2,000 troops in Iraq, it is the third-largest contributor of troops there, after the United States and Britain.
Mr. Saakashvili, 40, had about a year to go in his five-year term when, in November, he called early elections. He hoped to win a new mandate after he declared a state of emergency on Nov. 7 and ordered a police crackdown on antigovernment protests. In the dispersal of demonstrators, more than 500 people were injured, none fatally.
