Ruling party leads in exit polls

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — An exit poll showed President Mikhail Saakashvili’s ruling party winning a strong majority in Georgia’s parliamentary election yesterday, a result his opponents immediately challenged.

Opposition supporters gathered for a late-night street protest.

The vote was seen as a test of the pro-Western leader’s commitment to democracy, crucial to his aim of bringing the former Soviet republic into NATO.

The exit poll gave Mr. Saakashvili’s United National Movement more than 63 percent of the nationwide vote by party list. Mr. Saakashvili’s opponents rejected the results of the exit poll.

“There was total falsification, especially in the regions,” Georgy Gamkrelidze, a leader of the main United Opposition bloc, said by telephone. “According to our data, the picture is totally different.”

The exit poll put the opposition bloc a distant second, with about 14 percent in the nationwide party-list voting that will fill half the 150 Parliament seats.

In the district races whose winners will fill the other 75 seats, the poll predicted that Mr. Saakashvili’s party would win more than 53 percent of the overall vote, with the United Opposition trailing with nearly 16 percent.

The Central Election Commission said it would not release any preliminary results until today.

Opposition leaders began to release their own partial results, which they said were based on data from polling precincts. They showed the numbers on a big screen early today as the crowd at the late-night rally near the Central Election Commission headquarters rose to more than 1,000.

They said that in Tbilisi, the capital, the United Opposition was ahead with more than 40 percent to 32 percent for the United National Movement.

But Mr. Saakashvili’s party was confident of a win.

Mr. Saakashvili’s opponents accuse him of being an authoritarian leader who has sacrificed democracy and human rights for the sake of retaining power.

He was elected by a landslide after leading the Rose Revolution in 2003, a mass protest over allegations of widespread fraud in an election for Parliament. He has angered Moscow by seeking NATO membership and courting the West.