Georgia’s political crisis deepened last night after the leader of the country’s Rose Revolution narrowly won re-election as president and his rivals threatened mass demonstrations to overturn the result.

Mikheil Saakashvili won 52.8 per cent of the vote in provisional results announced by the head of Georgia’s election commission, just above the 50 per cent threshold required for an outright victory in the first round.

The late-night announcement by Levan Tarkhnishvili was highly unusual and made it appear that more than half of ballots had been counted in just one hour. As he spoke, the commission’s election website showed that votes in fewer than half the electoral precincts had been counted.

Opposition leaders insisted that the poll was rigged and urged supporters to resume street protests. A brutal police crackdown on demonstrators in November prompted Mr Saakashvili to call the early election to restore trust in his leadership.

The narrowness of his first-round victory and the bitterness of the campaign makes this unlikely, at least in the short term. More than 5,000 opposition supporters joined a protest rally in the capital Tbilisi yesterday. Levan Gachechiladze, who came a distant second with 27 per cent, insisted that his campaign’s vote tallies showed that he had won. He told the crowd: “Saakashvili lost and it cannot happen that Georgia will not defend its freedom, that we won’t win.”

He urged them to begin a rolling campaign of demonstrations. Mr Gachechiladze accused the President’s supporters of multiple voting and stealing ballot boxes, claiming that he had video evidence of violations.

However, international monitors said that the country’s “first genuinely competitive presidential election” had largely met democratic standards. Alcee Hastings, the US Congressman leading the team from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), said that democracy in Georgia had taken “a triumphant step”. But the observers’ report also highlighted “significant challenges” in the conduct of the election and said that it had been marked by “pervasive allegations of violations”. It criticised Mr Saakashvili for mixing state and election activities to create “an inequitable campaign environment”.

The US also urged candidates to respect the observers’ judgment, but Russia denounced the OSCE’s verdict as “superficial” and said that the opposition had faced “blatant pressure”.

Mr Saakashvili looked relieved as he and other political leaders, including Mr Gachechiladze, attended midnight mass in Tbilisi to celebrate Orthodox Christmas. But there was no masking the scale of the decline in his popularity. Mr Saakashvili slipped below 50 per cent at one point during last night’s count. Failure to secure a first-round victory would have been a humiliating rebuff for a man who swept to power four years ago with 97 per cent of the vote after ousting the former President Eduard Shevardnadze in the Rose Revolution.

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