Voters in Georgia Republic Are at a Crossroads: Russia or the West?

Voters in Georgia, a mountainous country at the strategic center of the Caucasus, are casting their ballots in a parliamentary election on Saturday that could derail the country’s decades-long pro-Western course and push it closer to Russia and China.

The governing Georgian Dream party, which has been in power since 2012 and increasingly tilts toward Russia, seeks a supermajority. That way, the party has vowed, it could use the result to outlaw its main opponents, the United National Movement and its satellite groups, which favor the West.

In turn, the opposition, which has been divided into four main political forces, aims to end Georgian Dream’s rule and to more concretely steer the country toward membership in the European Union and NATO.

“The elections will decide whether Georgia will be democratic or authoritarian,” Giorgi Gakharia, a former prime minister and the leader of the For Georgia party, said in an interview. “The elections will decide Georgia’s future course not for the next four years, but for the next decade.”

The results will reverberate in the region and beyond. As of 5 p.m. Georgia time, the nation’s election administration said that the turnout was at 50.6 percent. And as the polls closed on Saturday night, opposition and pro-government television networks published exit polls that gave divergent results — and both sides were claiming victory. The country’s elections authority was expected to deliver first results in a few hours.

After more than three decades of being among the most pro-Western states to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia could join the expanding group of illiberal states that try to perform a balancing act between Russia and China, and the West.