On 9 July, two candidates for the post of chair and five candidates for membership on the Central Election Commission (CEC) were proposed to the president following the recent resignation of Tamar Zhvania on 30 June.
A selection commission composed of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the academic field listened to seven candidates for the CEC chairmanship and selected current employees of the administration Giorgi Kalandarishvili and Giorgi Santuriani. Kalandarishvili was appointed as the head of the CEC Human Resources Management Department in 2019. Santuriani has been working at the CEC since 2018. He has been the head of the CEC Legal Department since 2020.
Representatives of the non-governmental sector did not support the CEC chairmanship candidates. “The selected candidates do not meet the criteria of independence and principality,” Executive Director of Georgian non-governmental organisation IDFI (Institute for Development of Freedom of Information) Giorgi Kldiashvili noted. The Head of the Georgian Young Lawyers' Association Nika Simonishvili also didn’t support the candidates for the CEC chairmanship and noted that if the president approves these candidates and presents them to the parliament, the legislature should not support them. Mamuka Khazaradze from the faction Lelo - Partnership for Georgia thinks that the nomination of CEC staff for chairmanship indicates that the Georgian Dream is trying to select people who will serve them.
The ruling Georgian Dream parliamentarian Shalva Papuashvili said that the NGOs planned to leave the Central Election Commission (CEC) unstaffed. He also noted that the recent comments of the representatives of NGOs directly show “inauthentic and coordinated behaviour.” “We heard from non-governmental organisations that the commission may not select candidates at all and if the candidates for the CEC chairmanship and membership could not be selected, only the political party side of the CEC would be staffed from 1 August. This means that we would have a CEC with an opposition majority,” he stated.
On 30 June, the chairperson of Georgia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) Tamar Zhvania announced her resignation from the post. In her Facebook post, Zhvania wrote that she believes that the election regulations adopted under the agreement of the EU Council President Charles Michel have brought a new reality. With this new reality, she believes that the election of a new chairperson of the Central Election Commission under the new rule will be a contributing factor to broad political consent. The opposition parties in Georgia accused Zhvania of fabricating the 2020 parliamentary elections along with the ruling Georgian Dream party (Caucasus Watch reported).
