On a cold mid-December evening in the center of Tbilisi, I met Nika Khotchdava, a 28-year-old disc jockey and manager at the popular techno club Left Bank. As we spoke, Nika and I were surrounded by a vast crowd of tens of thousands of his compatriots, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who had gathered in front of the Georgian parliament building to protest the ruling Georgian Dream party’s decision to suspend accession talks with the European Union. On the heels of a national election in late October that is widely believed to have been rigged, the decision about the EU has plunged Georgia into a crisis in which the country’s future in the West may be at stake.
“This is our final chance,” Khotchdava said, explaining that Georgian Dream was embarking on the last step of a “special operation” to bring his country under “the Russian umbrella.” Behind him, high up on the facade of the parliament building, someone had projected a slogan: “USA and EU. Georgian people are asking you to apply sanctions to [Georgian leader] Bidzina Ivanishvili and the illegitimate government.”
The standoff between protesters and police in the capital had grown increasingly tense, and antigovernment protests were spreading to many other parts of the country. The government has met them with savage force. So far more than 400 people have been arrested, many of them sustaining serious injuries in the process. In a small country like Georgia, this is a shockingly high figure: the number of detainees would translate into more than 36,000 if mapped onto the population of the United States.
In Tbilisi, I met with dozens of people from opposition parties and civil society organizations, as well as diplomats and regional experts. Several young Georgians who still bore the visible marks of beating described being detained at peaceful protests by security forces; one independent election monitor recounted how he had been roughed up to leave a polling station by a crowd of thugs. Many Georgians now say that the country is on the verge of one-party dictatorship. This is a remarkable turn for a country that two decades ago U.S. President George W. Bush hailed as a “beacon of liberty.”
There is now little doubt that the October election was fraudulent. Yet the response of Western governments has been strangely muted. In its preliminary report on the election, the human rights watchdog for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe praised Georgian election officials for running the vote “efficiently and transparently.” It cited a few irregularities but did not condemn the ruling party’s manipulation of the vote. A European official declared that “the engagement shown on election day” should be considered evidence “of a system that is still growing and evolving, with a democratic vitality under construction.” Overall, European and U.S. officials are not ready to burn bridges with Tbilisi and have limited themselves to noting that “international observers have not declared the result to be free and fair.”
Authoritarian leaders were far less timid. China’s foreign policy spokesperson praised the country for holding “a smooth parliamentary election.” Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro commended Georgian Dream for winning “an exemplary, stellar victory.” Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban sent his congratulations to the Georgian Dream party on its “overwhelming victory.”
The reasons for Georgia’s authoritarian turn have a lot to do with domestic politics—and specifically the rise of Georgian Dream, a vehicle for the political ambitions of the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia. Since it came to power in 2012, Georgian Dream has slowly but steadily pursued a course toward authoritarian rule that now appears on the verge of culmination. Yet the West, once so eager to champion Georgia’s struggling democracy, has retreated into passivity. Over the years, the United States and Europe have relied on policies toward the country that are rich in rewards and poor in enforcement, leaving Georgian Dream largely free to consolidate power on its own terms. Now Georgians are paying the price, with Tbilisi threatening to pivot decisively away from the West and toward Russia.
Moscow has a great deal at stake in this contest. For centuries, the Russians have viewed the South Caucasus as their strategic backyard, a vital bulwark against Turks, Iranians, and other competing powers. In addition, the twentieth-century discovery of vast hydrocarbon reserves in Central Asia cast a spotlight on Georgia’s key position along transit routes that, given the proper infrastructure, could link those resources with European markets, thus potentially undermining Russia’s former dominance over Eurasian pipeline networks. Russian President Vladimir Putin is also determined to prevent any country—whether it be Georgia or Moldova or Ukraine—from showcasing the virtues of European-style liberal democracy within the former Soviet empire.
A DREAM DEFERRED
With its small population of 3.7 million, Georgia has long benefited from its status as one of the few remaining democracies in a strategically sensitive region. For most of the nearly 35 years since it gained independence from the Soviet Union, Georgia has been struggling to cement a relationship with the West that would protect its freedom and frustrate Russian imperial designs. Westerners have generally responded to those aspirations with sympathy and support—not least because a pro-Western Georgia could be a crucial ally in a region where the United States and Europe are in desperate need of reliable friends. Recent polls have affirmed a long-standing trend: more than 80 percent of Georgians see their country’s future with the European Union. In December 2023, the EU acknowledged that desire by officially declaring Georgia a candidate for membership.
Today, that European promise looks more like a dream that will never be fulfilled. On October 26, defying expectations, the ruling party proclaimed that it had easily won the national election. According to the official outcome, Georgian Dream managed to gain 53.9 percent of the vote, enough to ensure control of the parliament. The rest of the votes went to an array of opposition parties, only four of which managed to clear the five percent threshold for inclusion in the new parliament. The Georgian opposition has long been hampered by its own internal divisions, leaving no individual party in the lead.
Most Georgians wish to lessen Moscow’s influence over their country.
But there is clear and overwhelming evidence that the election was rigged. Ballot stuffing, vote buying, and outright intimidation of domestic election monitors have been widely documented by domestic election monitors as well as foreign observers. Nongovernment pollsters found lukewarm support for Georgian Dream—mostly in the low 40s before the election—and predicted a likely outcome far lower than the actual result. Independent polls suggested that Georgian Dream would have still won the most votes of any party but fallen short of a simple majority. Exit polls on election day also fell far short of the official outcome.
Looming behind Georgian Dream’s manipulation of the election is the shadow of Putin’s Russia. From the start, Ivanishvili and his aides have understood that most Georgians wish to lessen Moscow’s influence over their country; many see Putin as the latest in a long line of imperialist Russian leaders intent on suppressing their aspirations for national self-determination. The same impulse undergirds Georgians’ repeatedly expressed preference for liberal democracy, which is valued not only on its own terms but also as a bulwark against Russian-style tyranny.
Ivanishvili’s party developed a subtle strategy to get around these problems. Taking its cues from right-wing populists elsewhere, the party has pushed a program of “traditional values,” fulminating against the lgbtq community and accusing Europe of trying to impose an alien agenda on conservative Georgians. (Like Putin, Ivanishvili has closely allied himself with the Orthodox Church, which has been happy to bless some of his most reactionary impulses.) Even though Moscow clearly favors Georgian Dream’s agenda, Ivanishvili has been careful to avoid overtly pro-Russian positions. Instead, he has opted for fearmongering, painting his opponents and their Western supporters as scheming to drag Georgia into the war in Ukraine. Evoking this specter of “the global war party” plays on Georgians’ traumatic memory of their own war with Russia in 2008, which left Moscow holding one-fifth of the country’s territory to this day.
The party’s disinformation campaigns also often overlap with the rhetoric and themes deployed by the Kremlin or U.S. right-wing conspiracy theorists. Recently, a Georgian public television station broadcast an interview with someone named Kimberly Lowe, an obscure Republican politician from Virginia who does not hold public office and criticized current U.S. policy on Georgia as “unfair” and presented herself as a possible mediator between Tbilisi and Brussels. Georgian Dream sympathizers presented the interview as evidence that President-elect Donald Trump is preparing to lavish favors upon the party once he takes office in 2025—a characteristically bizarre example of wishful thinking.
DEEPENING ILLIBERALISM
Since it came to power 12 years ago, Georgian Dream has conducted a master class in the art of state capture. Ivanishvili has gradually replaced virtually all the key officials in the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and law enforcement with party loyalists. In a country where a third of the population is employed by the state or directly depends on government handouts, this control of the state bureaucracy is a powerful tool for ensuring desired electoral outcomes. In 2017, Georgian Dream used a resounding victory in the previous year’s election to lay the groundwork for an extensive “reform” of the constitution that gave the party a massive advantage in future votes. It has slowly established control over the central election commission and precinct electoral commissions.
In the past, even as Georgian Dream squeezed its opponents and deepened its control over the machinery of state, it continued to hold out the prospect of cooperation with the West. In turn, officials in Brussels and Washington largely overlooked the party’s antidemocratic tendencies. Consider the dispute over the infamous foreign agents’ law. In early 2023, the ruling party introduced the first version of a law designed to impose strict reporting requirements on private organizations receiving foreign funding. The draft text bore a conspicuous similarity to the Russian foreign agents’ law introduced by Putin in 2012, which has proven a highly effective tool for harassing the opposition; the “Russian law,” as the Georgian opposition soon dubbed it, was defeated by a wave of popular protests.
Yet just a few months later, the European Union offered Georgia candidate status, a massive boost to the prestige of a government that had already demonstrated its antidemocratic instincts. The Europeans made sure to predicate the offer on the fulfillment of nine crucial conditions aimed at strengthening democratic institutions. Even so, it is easy to understand why Georgian Dream might have concluded that its behavior was costing it very little in Western capitals. The party has since succeeded in pushing through a revised version of the law—a vital step on its path toward an Orban-style takeover of the state, with the Kremlin’s tacit approval.
In December, in response to the government’s violent crackdown on protesters, the United States imposed visa bans on some 20 Georgian government officials it accused “of undermining democracy.” The Baltic countries, breaking with the EU mainstream, have also issued a few sanctions. But so far, Washington has refused to impose a broader sanctions regime, despite indications that serious sanctions—financial measures as well as travel bans—could have a tangible impact on Ivanishvili and Georgian Dream officials. According to Washington-based Georgia-watchers, the Biden administration is considering such a package, but it may be reluctant to act without the support of its European allies. One Georgian Dream official told me that the party is not much concerned about the threat of sanctions, calling any such move unlikely to be carried out. Already, Hungary and Slovakia (which is also ruled by a right-wing populist) have torpedoed the latest EU effort to declare broader sanctions.
Georgian Dream has deepened its control over the machinery of state.
Outsiders can do only so much. In the end, it will be up to Georgians themselves to save Georgian democracy. Unfortunately, the established opposition is deeply fragmented and plagued by big egos and personal vendettas. The United National Movement (unm) of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, who ran the country for nine years after the 2003 Rose Revolution, implemented vital reforms but also ruled with a heavy hand. During its term in office, the UNM also manipulated elections and intimidated its critics. Its record left many voters embittered, and Ivanishvili has been happy to keep the decidedly unpopular party around (albeit in weakened form) as a way to taint opposition parties in general. But his threat to ban the opposition during the election campaign suggests that this policy of quasi-tolerance may be losing its appeal.
Over the past three and a half decades, Georgians have experienced civil war, kleptocracy, invasion, beleaguered institutions, and shattered dreams. For much of that time they have relied on friends and supporters in the West, who have showered the country with aid and advice, sometimes acting as mediators in its internal conflicts. But the rich relationships that evolved between Georgia and its foreign friends over the years also have created an unfortunate legacy. Western governments have burdened Georgia with a special status as a democracy-in-the-making in a region otherwise beset by despotism. Georgians sometimes treat their foreign sponsors as saviors. Noting the willingness of Western governments to overlook the sins of the Saakashvili government, Stephen Jones, a Georgia expert at Harvard, observed after this fall’s election that they tended to ignore the “persistent illiberalism in Georgian politics which grew under the cover of democracy.” Opposition parties have also sometimes misplayed their hand. Many Georgians point out that opposition leaders tend to spend more time in Brussels and Washington than among Georgian voters. Several of the Gen Z demonstrators out on the streets of Tbilisi, citing the poor reputation of the established opposition parties, said that they preferred their own protest movement to remain leaderless—an approach that has created weaknesses of its own.
The most plausible leader of the principled opposition to the regime is Salome Zurabishvili, the outgoing president, who served for the past six years and has been vocal in calling out the fraudulent election. In mid-December, Georgian Dream moved to replace her with its own candidate, a far-right former soccer star, by a vote from an electoral college that is based largely on the new, Georgian Dream‒controlled parliament. But Zurabishvili and the opposition regard the parliament as illegitimate, dismissing it as the product of a fraudulent vote. The opposition and the protesters are demanding new elections, preferably supervised by international observers. Some of the young demonstrators I spoke with suggested that Zurabishvili could serve as a rallying point for the opposition if such an election should come to pass.
But Washington seems unlikely to take further action during the final weeks of the Biden administration, and the EU has until now failed to reach consensus on what should be done—not least because Hungary is poised to veto meaningful punishments. Meanwhile, Ivanishvili knows that making any concessions to the opposition could consign him to the same fate suffered by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014, who was toppled by another popular uprising motivated by passionate attachment to Europe. In Georgia, the irresistible force is about to meet the unmovable object. The window for a positive outcome is closing by the hour.
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