Mikheil Saakashvili has hailed his election win. According to preliminary results, Saakashvili has narrowly won an absolute majority with more than 52 percent of the vote. His nearest rival, Levan Gachechiladze, candidate of a nine-party opposition coalition, has received a credible 25-27 percent of the vote with the other five candidates limping behind in single digits.
Mikheil Saakashvili received valuable endorsements when the United States followed the OSCE, the European Union and NATO (the latter two are the blocs the pro-Western leader wants Georgia to join) in giving Saturday`s presidential election a qualified welcome.
Speaking in an interview with Reuters, Saakashvili said Georgia`s fledgling democracy had passed its toughest test yet. "We can have free and fair elections, good elections, clean elections and with basically a very competitive environment. It (the result) could have gone the other way around," he said.
The United States praised the vote, but it urged the Georgian government to investigate voting irregularities highlighted by a team of international observers. "We congratulate the people of Georgia," U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in a statement. "We agree ... that this was the first genuinely competitive presidential election in Georgia."
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana called the vote "truly competitive ", and a NATO spokesman echoed a report by Western observers that the election was broadly fair.
Western diplomats used to classify Georgia as a "failed state". Under Saakashvili, a 40-year-old lawyer trained in the United States, it has a corruption-free government, annual economic growth is in double digits and foreign investment is booming.
Saakashvili said his program of liberal economic reforms would continue but acknowledged his administration needed to listen more. "We should become more inclusive," he said.
