By Felix Light and Lucy Papachristou
TBILISI (Reuters) -Georgians voted on Saturday in a parliamentary election depicted by both sides as an existential battle that will determine whether the country integrates closely with the West or leans back towards Russia.
The vote pits the ruling Georgian Dream party, in power since 2012, against four main blocs representing the pro-Western opposition. Polls opened at 0400 GMT and will close at 1600 GMT, with some 3.5 million Georgians eligible to cast ballots.
Georgian Dream's reclusive billionaire founder and ex-prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, said the election was "a very simple choice.
"Either we elect a government that serves you, the Georgian people...or we elect an agent of a foreign country that will only fulfil the tasks of a foreign country," Ivanishvili, considered to be the country's main powerbroker, said as he cast his vote in Tbilisi on Saturday.
"This day will determine Georgia's future," President Salome Zourabichvili, a Georgian Dream critic whose powers are mostly ceremonial, said after she voted in the capital.
"Tonight there will be a victory and that victory will be that of Georgia, of all of Georgia," she said.
Georgia, which lost swathes of its territory to Russian-backed separatists in the 1990s and was defeated in a brief Russian invasion in 2008, was for decades one of the most pro-Western states to emerge from the Soviet Union.
But since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgian Dream has moved the country decisively back towards Moscow's orbit, accusing the West of trying to lure it into war. The opposition calls the shift a betrayal of Georgia's European future.
Media sympathetic to the opposing sides have published rival polls, with pro-opposition broadcasters forecasting Georgian Dream will lose its majority, and those supporting the ruling party predicting a landslide victory with its best showing ever.
Though all sides said they hoped for a peaceful vote, the Caucasus country has had a volatile political history since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, with several popular uprisings and episodes of civil unrest.
The authorities used force to disperse demonstrations this year against a law requiring groups that receive funding from abroad to register as foreign agents, which the opposition and the West called a Russian-inspired measure to stifle dissent.
'GLOBAL WAR PARTY'
Ivanishvili has cast Saturday's election as an existential fight to prevent what he calls a "Global War Party" in the West from pushing Tbilisi into direct conflict with Moscow.
"Right now, some people don't understand the danger they might face if we're defeated. But we will try our best to win and show the people the correct path," Georgian Dream activist Sandro Dvalishvili told Reuters.
Georgian Dream says its aim is to obtain three quarters of the seats in parliament to introduce a constitutional ban on the main opposition party, the United National Movement.
Opposition parties and President Zourabichvili accuse Georgian Dream of buying votes and intimidating voters, which it denies.
Opposition activists say that only a close alliance with the West, including membership in the European Union, would protect Georgia from Russia.
"Russian imperialism's hunger knows no bounds. And that’s why we need strong allies. And those strong allies are in the European Union," said Nana Malashkhia, a former civil servant who shot to fame last year after being filmed waving an EU flag while being blasted with a police water cannon at a protest. She is now running for parliament.
The EU granted Georgia candidate membership status last year but has put its application on hold in response to what it says is backsliding on democracy under Georgian Dream.
The four main opposition parties aim to form a coalition government to oust Georgian Dream from power and put Georgia back on track to join the EU.