Election officials at one of Tbilisi’s precincts empty ballot boxes as counting begins in Georgia’s parliamentary elections, October 8, 2016. Photo: Eana Korbezashvili/Civil.ge

With almost all the votes counted, early official results of the proportional part of the October 8 parliamentary elections show ruling GDDG party winning 48.6% of votes.

UNM opposition party, which is contesting official results, has 27%, according to vote tally protocols from 3,680 out of 3,702 precincts.

An election bloc, led by Alliance of Patriots, hangs in balance as it hovers around 5% threshold, which is a required minimum for a party to enter the Parliament.

As the returns from the precincts were coming in, the Alliance of Patriots was slowly approaching the 5% threshold, reaching the mark briefly before again slipping just below the threshold to 4.99%.

These results do not include vote tallies from 22 precincts, which the Central Election Commission has yet to post on its website.
 
The fourth-placed Free Democrats, led by Irakli Alasania, also falls short of the threshold with 4.59% of the votes.

Nino Burjanadze’s Democratic Movement has 3.55%, followed by State for People election bloc, led by opera singer Paata Burchuladze – 3.45%; Labor Party –  3.12%; Republican Party – 1.55%.

All the other 17 parties and election blocs, which were running in the elections, have slightly over 3% of the votes combined.

If these early results stand, it means that only two parties – GDDG and UNM – will share 77 seats between each other proportionally to their votes as no other party is clearing 5% threshold.

The remaining 73 seats in the Parliament were contested in 73 single-mandate constituencies.

According to preliminary results, race for majoritarian MP seats will go into second round in 51 single-mandate constituencies, where no candidate is garnering more than 50% of votes.

GDDG majoritarian MP candidates are winning outright in the first round in at least 22 single-mandate constituencies; GDDG had candidates in 72 out of total 73 districts. In most, but not all of the districts candidates from GDDG and UNM will be facing each other in the runoffs.