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Georgia Establishing Democratic Institutions
Prior to the 1989 elections, the Georgian Communist Party
maintained tight control over the nomination process. Even in
1989, candidates ran unopposed in forty-three of seventy-five
races, and elsewhere pairings with opposition candidates were
manipulated to guarantee results favoring the party. In Tbilisi
grassroots movements succeeded in nominating three candidates to
the Georgian Supreme Soviet in 1989. The leaders of these
movements were mostly young intellectuals who had not been active
dissidents. Many of those figures later joined to form a new
political party, Democratic Choice for Georgia, abbreviated as
DASi in Georgian. Because of expertise in local political
organization, DASi played a leading role in drafting legislation
for local and national elections between 1990 and 1992.
The death of the Tbilisi demonstrators in April 1989 led to
a major change in the Georgian political atmosphere. Radical
nationalists such as Gamsakhurdia were the primary beneficiaries
of the national outrage following the April Tragedy. In his role
as opposition leader, Gamsakhurdia formed a new political bloc in
1990, the Round Table/Free Georgia coalition.
In 1990 Georgia was the last Soviet republic to hold
elections for the republic parliament. Protests and strikes
against the election law and the nominating process had led to a
six-month postponement of the elections until October 1990.
Opposition forces feared that the political realities favored
entrenched communist party functionaries and the enterprise and
collective farm officials they had put in place. According to
reports, about one-third of the 2,300 candidates for the Supreme
Soviet (as the Georgian parliament was still designated at that
time) fell into this category.
The electoral system adopted in August 1990, which
represented a compromise between competing versions put forward
by the Patiashvili government and the opposition, created the
first truly multiparty elections in the Soviet Union. The new
Georgian election law combined district-level, single-mandate,
majority elections with a proportional party list system for the
republic as a whole; a total of 250 seats would constitute the
new parliament. On one hand, the proportional voting system
required that a party gain at least 4 percent of the total votes
to achieve representation in parliament. On the other hand,
candidates with strong local support could win office even if
their national totals fell below the 4 percent threshold. When
the elections finally were held, widespread fears of violence or
communist manipulation (expressed most vocally by Gamsakhurdia)
proved unfounded.
Data as of March 1994
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