It is a fine day in Georgia today, because today's elections brought one more victory to democracy.

These elections are observed very intensively by our friends as well as our enemies, but compared with our people, everything bears secondary importance. Our people expressed amazing maturity and didn't leave a single argument to those, who used to say: people do not come to the elections; otherwise we would have a different result. Today there was highest activity of our people. I want to express gratitude to everyone on your behalf and I am sure that other political parties will join it. 

The gratitude goes to only one subject in Georgia - from all parties, we as well as the others, it goes to our multi-ethnic society, to the Georgian people.

We do not have final results yet, but you know that according to the results of new exit polls, the same number of people voted for National Movement as in 2008 voted for parliamentary elections and four years ago for local elections.

This means that we still have the trust and support of our people and this is very important.

I want to congratulate each of you!

If four years ago Gigi's support was based on hope, today it is based on what has been done and must be done in Georgia.

This is what we congratulate on, but at the same time this is big responsibility, because there is more expectation and there is a lot of work ahead.

I hope that after calculating the votes, after the final results are released, our hopes will come true and our political party will gain a victory.

These elections represent an important victory of democracy. I want to thank you - every political party, with few exceptions - they all expressed amazing maturity compare to the previous elections. 

We are still far from what should be real correctness, difference in opinions, election campaigns, the way it should be in a developed European country like we are building now. We have put a step forward. In pre-elections period there was much more concrete dialogue with people and there was less swearing, among them of the President - I almost felt myself "abandoned".

Four years ago, for the first time after 19^th century, I had a privilege to present the first elected Mayor of Tbilisi (though Gigi Ugulava was an elected Mayor, but elected by the City Council).

Today we hope, that after counting the votes we will have privilege, for the first time in history to present the first directly elected Mayor, who had a great support from the people.   

Gigi Ugulava, together with the candidates and our activists had a great pre-election campaign. He went to people round the clock, explained to them what had been done and what should be done in future.

It is doubtless that peoples' choice was conditioned by Gigi Ugulava's personality and by what was done for the past four years. So much has never been done in the capital and the regions (except occupied territories), this first of all is the merit of our people and of course of this man and the unity of our team. Our strength is in our unity. We have reached this result, because we put our aims higher than our personal interests. It is not true that enemy will tear Georgia, that jail always breaks from inside - on the contrary, we say that we will build Georgia with our unity and we will bring this construction to the end.

I as the President, who doesn't have a right to intrude into local government's work, want to introduce from this perspective, a brilliant Tbilisi citizen, a real patriot, a very active person and my very close friend - Gigi Ugulava!