Shevardnadze Seeks Mandate in Election : Politics: Crisis-weary Georgians go to polls looking for a fresh start.

This land of vineyards and impassioned politics tried democracy once but chose a leader so harsh and mercurial he sparked an armed revolt. Today, Georgia tries again, with Eduard A. Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, the only candidate for the top job.

With war spreading in Georgia’s pro-separatist Abkhazia region on the Black Sea coast and Georgia’s economy so battered that it takes a month’s salary for many to buy a few gallons of gasoline, Shevardnadze and the rest of the country’s leaders want a fresh start.

The mechanism they have hit upon is an electoral system tailor-made for Shevardnadze. The respected world statesman will become chairman of Parliament, and therefore Georgia’s supreme leader, if just one-third of the people voting today concur. He will then be granted as many powers as the legislature decides.

Shevardnadze, who personifies the end of the East-West schism but was once the Kremlin’s obedient Communist Party viceroy in Georgia, returned to power in his Caucasus Mountains homeland after the successful uprising against Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the elected president chased from office in January.

But since installing their offices in a Tbilisi building that once housed the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Gamsakhurdia’s successors have been unable to solve many pressing economic and political problems, and they have watched in horror as Georgia’s ragtag military has retreated in disorder from the ethnic fighting in Abkhazia.

“The majority of our citizens know that (today’s) elections are critical to the well-being of the country,” Shevardnadze told reporters Saturday. “A popular mandate definitely yields much wider opportunities.”

As well as voting on whether Shevardnadze, now chairman of the interim State Council, should lead a revived legislature, Georgia’s 3.5 million voters will elect Parliament’s other members, choosing from a smorgasbord of 47 rival parties, movements and blocs.

For many crisis-weary Georgians, however, the elections are primarily a chance to express their confidence that Shevardnadze can return the chaos-ridden politics and economy in this former Soviet republic to normalcy.

“For the moment, he is the only capable man,” said Bano Lobzhanidze, 37, a cafe owner who was chased from his home in Abkhazia last week by the fighting and is now being housed with hundreds of other refugees in a dimly lit hotel in downtown Tbilisi. “Who else can my people call on?”

In Georgia, which grows an astonishing variety of foodstuffs ranging from wheat to tangerines and cheese, state-run commerce has broken down to the point where long lines cluster perennially outside bakeries and fishermen stand by the roadside hawking their catch of the day to motorists.

Critical matters like privatization and agricultural reform have been put on hold until after the elections.

Georgy Chanturia, chairman of the National Democratic Party of Georgia, said Shevardnadze also needs a clear mandate to be able to dissolve the 14 armed formations now acting on Georgian soil, including the national guard, which its commander, State Council member Tengiz Kitovani, exploits as a power base.

Partisans of the ultranationalist Gamsakhurdia, known as a “Zviadists,” loudly claim that he is still Georgia’s lawful leader because he won 87% of the vote in a presidential election in May, 1991, and was deposed by force of arms.

That violent and divisive episode was enough to give the presidential system a bad name for other Georgians, which is why the top post in the government is once again a Soviet-style legislative chairmanship.

Zviadists have been calling for a boycott of today’s elections, and Shevardnadze accused them Saturday of plotting to sabotage the democratic process by assassinating him and blowing up the building where the State Council meets.

“Fifty terrorist subjects have been arrested, and arms and explosives, including rockets, have been seized,” Shevardnadze said, without giving details.

Gamsakhurdia’s partisans charge that Georgia’s current leaders routinely target them for harassment, and they mock Shevardnadze’s worldwide reputation as a liberal democrat. Their newspaper, Iveri Spektr, has had its offices burglarized, and it was closed for a time by authorities last summer.

The former Georgian president’s strongholds in Mingrelia in western Georgia are among at least six districts where elections will not be held today, purportedly for reasons of public safety but also denying many Zviadists the opportunity to express their opinion at the polls.

Shevardnadze’s most urgent concern has become the separatist movement in Abkhazia, where local ethnic militants are being aided by armed Cossack mercenaries and Muslim “mountain people” streaming in from their enclaves on the northern slopes of the Caucasus, in Russia.

On Saturday, Shevardnadze threatened to send Georgian troops across the border with Russia to fight the “mountain people”--an incursion that would seriously heighten the tension between the two former republics, which have seemingly been drifting toward armed confrontation for the past several weeks.

Georgians now accuse Russian authorities, including high-ranking military commanders, of aiding Abkhazians by smuggling them military hardware.

Asked about those charges, Shevardnadze was quick to voice his confidence in Russian President Boris N. Yelstin, who he said had “done a lot to make the frontier impregnable.”

But Shevardnadze said that Yeltsin has still not fulfilled a request to transfer away from Georgia the Russian generals whom the Georgians find suspicious.