Georgia’s prime minister has hailed a “landslide” election result, rejecting allegations of vote-rigging and violence.

“Irregularities happen everywhere, in every country”, Irakli Kobakhidze of the Georgian Dream party told the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg in an exclusive interview.

The prime minister insisted that out of 3,111 polling stations, there had been incidents in “just a couple of precincts” but that in all the others “the environment was completely peaceful”.

“Of course we have to address these irregularities happening on the day of the election or before”, the Georgian prime minister told the BBC. “But the general content of the elections was in line with legal principles and the principle of democratic elections”.

In his BBC interview, Kobakhidze accused the opposition of lying, arguing that they had also said the vote had been falsified in 2016, 2020 and 2021.

“Of course they have now no other way, so they have to tell their supporters that either they were lying or the government rigged the elections”. An electronic vote-counting system was used for the first time on Saturday, and the prime minister said that made the election impossible to rig: “There is zero space for manipulation”.

Russian commentators have widely welcomed Georgian Dream’s victory as an indication that Georgia will begin to pivot back to Moscow.

However, Irakli Kobakhidze used his BBC interview to deny the opposition’s accusation that the government was pro-Russian and “pro-Putinist”. He said they had been trying to damage the government’s reputation with Georgia’s 3.7 million population. The prime minister said that Georgia was the only country in its region with no diplomatic relations with Russia, because of Russia’s occupation of 20% of Georgian territory since the 2008 war.