The Movement of New Forces, the party of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, will get another chance to try to register its candidates for the snap parliamentary elections scheduled for July 21, thanks to a Saturday decision by the Supreme Court of Ukraine.
The decision, announced in the wee hours of the morning, is a defeat for the Central Electoral Commission, which had refused to register the party’s candidate list on June 23. This will effectively force the commission to review the party’s registration a second time.
David Sakvarelidze, a Movement of New Forces member, was present during the court’s announcement. Afterwards, Sakvarelidze announced that the party would register its candidates with the commission on the same day.
He also said he wants to prove that the commission bore “political and criminal guilt,” according to Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform.
The dispute between the Central Electoral Commission and the Movement of New Forces arose on June 23, when the commission refused to register the party’s list of candidates for the upcoming parliamentary elections. The commission alleged that the party lied in its documents.
Commission chairwoman Tetyana Slipachuk had said that the party could not have declared its intention to run on May 8 because President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced his intention to hold the elections on May 21.
Mikheil Saakashvili served as the president of Georgia from 2004 through 2013. He received Ukrainian citizenship in 2015 and was stripped of it in 2017 after coming into conflict with then-president Petro Poroshenko. Saakashvili recovered his Ukrainian citizenship on May 28.
