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"Voters in Georgia's capital city appeared on Monday to have overwhelmingly endorsed President Mikheil Saakashvili's ruling party in municipal elections, barely a year after opposition parties had thronged the streets vowing to force him from office...
"Observers who had expected Mr. Saakashvili's support to collapse after the 2008 war were proved wrong; over the last year, his party, the United National Movement, has largely regained the popularity it had before the war. But there are fundamental tensions in the electorate nonetheless. An April survey of 2,378 people by the National Democratic Institute, an American nonprofit organization that supports democratic institutions, showed that 52 percent of the voters disagreed with Georgia's policy toward Russia and 46 percent said the country was not a democracy. The poll, which consisted of face-to-face interviews, had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points."