On October 13th, 2017, the Eastern European Centre for Multiparty Democracy (EECMD) held the presentation of the website www.partiebi.ge. Tbilisi mayoral candidates, the leaders of the political parties, the representatives of diplomatic corps, local and international organizations attended the event.
The responses of the Tbilisi mayoral candidates are published on the renewed website. Through www.partiebi.ge the user is able to read the visions of the mayoral candidates and thematically compare them with each other. This website also offers the possibility to get acquainted with the financial rankings of the electoral programs of Tbilisi mayoral candidates. The aim the aforementioned rankings is to facilitate a rational and serious public analysis of the electoral promises. However, this is impossible to achieve amid the lack of knowledge on how and at what cost are the certain initiatives implemented by the candidates. For this reason, the initial phase of the project “financial ranking”evaluates the extent to which specific initiatives of the candidates are countable. The ‘financial ranking’ is not an in-depth analysis of the programs of the candidates, but rather the examination of the theoretical possibility of counting the programs.
Executive Director of the EECMD, Levan Tsutskiridze remarked that: “the number of promises, which are impossible to analyse economically, are noticeable. We asked all the candidates to fill out the questionnaire, so that we could have been able to perform the analysis. Only three candidates, Kakha Kaladze, Elene Khoshtaria and Tengiz Shergelashvili, filled out the questionnaire more responsibly”.
One of the panelists of the presentation, Nino Lomjaria, pointed out the common tendency among all Tbilisi mayoral candidates –focus on the issue of ecology: “what we can single out, in contrast with the previous elections, is the fact that all the candidates are focusing on the issue of ecology. Even when they discuss other priorities, they return back to ecology. For instance, how the regulation of transportation can solve the problem of ecology”.
www.partiebi.ge will be available in Georgian, English, Armenian and Azerbaijani languages.The website is also accessible for deaf and blind people.
From 2012 onwards, www.partiebi.ge regularly publishes pre-election views of the political parties/mayoral candidates regarding the most important political, economic and social issues in the country.The project is funded by the Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands in Georgia and for the 2017 Local Self-Government elections aims at facilitating the formation of pre-election views of mayoral candidates as well as informing the society regarding these views.