There are two types of election posters adorning billboards in downtown Tbilisi. The first, for the ruling Georgian Dream party, has the colour and stars of the EU flag, vaunting Georgia’s destiny as an EU member.
The second type is also for GD, since almost no sites were made available to opposition parties in the centre of the city. Darker and more menacing, these posters juxtapose scenes of destruction in Ukraine — the collapsed bridge at Irpin, the ruined theatre in Mariupol — with pristine buildings in Georgia. The message is clear: choose GD, a party controlled by the pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, for peace, or back the opposition and bring war.
While the pro-EU message of the first posters is calculated to garner support in a country where the overwhelming majority of people are in favour of joining, these latter posters have outraged many Georgians, who feel a deep sense of solidarity with Ukraine. The mountainous Caucasus nation has fought two wars with Russia since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Moscow’s seizure of the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008 — with little resistance from the west — marked the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s attempt to re-establish a Russian empire through military might.
“It is so insulting to most Georgians when you try to capitalise on the misery of our friends and use it for political ends,” says Tina Bokuchava, leader of the biggest opposition party, United National Movement.
“It’s a really rare case of the government terrifying its own citizens for party benefit,” says Elene Khoshtaria, leader of Droa! (It’s time), part of the liberal opposition group, Coalition for Change.
Both Georgians and outside observers see the October 26 parliamentary election as the most important since independence three decades ago: a pivotal moment that will determine whether the country becomes a sovereign democracy integrated with the west, or falls back into autocracy and Russia’s orbit.
“Everything that Georgia has been through over the past 30 years — defending its identity, its European values and its European path, and its independence from the old colonial power that is Russia — all of that is at stake,” says President Salome Zourabichvili in an interview with the Financial Times. She was elected in 2018 with GD’s support, but has since become a fierce critic of its authoritarian turn.
Putin and his proxies are fighting hard to ensure that Russia’s former Soviet neighbours remain in its sphere of influence, and not just via the invasion of Ukraine. In Moldova earlier this week, President Maia Sandu came within a whisker of losing a referendum on EU membership after a pro-Russian vote-buying operation funded by Ilan Şor, a fugitive oligarch living in Moscow. Now it is Georgia’s turn.
“Georgia is much more important than the destiny of 4mn people on the other side of the Black Sea,” says Steven Everts, director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies think-tank. “It is also about what is Europe, what are European values? It is a battle for the soul of Europe.”
The election pits GD against a fractious opposition that has coalesced into four parties. The UNM is one, whose dominant figure is Mikheil Saakashvili, the jailed former president.
Both government and the opposition alliance claim to be on course for victory, making a clash over the result almost certain. Opposition leaders, civil society representatives and analysts fear Georgia could follow the example of Belarus, where a fraudulent election in 2020 resulted in full-scale repression with Moscow’s backing.
GD insists that avoiding war with Russia is one of its main successes, alongside fast economic growth, which hit 7.5 per cent last year, and rejects the idea Georgia’s place in the world is at stake.
“The opposition frames this election as a geopolitical choice, Europe versus Russia,” says Nikoloz Samkharadze, a GD MP. “We [the GD] don’t see it as an election that will define the fate of Georgia for the next 500 years. For us, this is a regular election where things at stake are the economy, social welfare, infrastructure and preservation of peace and stability.”
Nonetheless, the posters are just one part of an aggressive campaign that, critics say, bears the hallmarks of a Russian propaganda and manipulation operation, including a flood of disinformation on social media.
“It is completely alien to the Georgian culture, tradition, and mentality of a country that has historically experienced frequent wars and invasions,” says President Zourabichvili.
Since coming to power in 2012, GD has put loyalists in charge of major state institutions, including the judiciary, the electoral commission and the central bank. Earlier this year, the government defied mass demonstrations to push through an NGO “transparency of foreign influence” law — similar to one enacted in Russia — that critics say will be used to silence dissent.
It has also adopted legislation curtailing LGBT rights and made changes to the tax code to exempt assets transferred into the country from offshore jurisdictions. The changes potentially favour Ivanishvili, whose fortune is estimated by Bloomberg to be $7.5bn in a country whose GDP is $30bn.
Most provocative of all, in August the government said it would seek to ban the UNM party and its “satellites”. To critics, these actions underscore how far the country has veered towards authoritarianism under 12 years of GD rule — and how much further it could go if returned to power.
Ivanishvili served briefly as Georgia’s prime minister in 2012 before taking a back seat. He has continued to control and bankroll GD, and was made its honorary chair, a role that allows him to choose the party’s candidate for prime minister.
“Always listen to a dictator,” says Khatia Dekanoidze, a former minister of education and opposition MP. “Dictators say what they want to do.”
In a rare TV appearance on the pro-government broadcaster Imedi this week, Ivanishvili said that Georgia’s opposition was controlled by a “global war party” — a term he began using earlier this year to describe the west.
Georgia’s post-independence path
If Georgian democracy is at stake, so is the west’s credibility. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU vowed to reinvigorate its long-stalled process of enlarging to eastern and south-eastern Europe, arguing there should be no more grey zones that Moscow could exploit.
Ukraine and Moldova were rapidly granted “candidate status”, the first step on the path to membership, followed by Georgia late in 2023. But Georgia’s accession process has abruptly been frozen by the EU because of the government’s authoritarian shift.
For the US, Georgia has little economic or strategic importance. But in a troubled post-Soviet space, it has served as a rare beacon of democracy and reform. Even though the Biden administration has sought to make strengthening democracy a principle of its foreign policy, that too could be lost.
GD’s opponents are convinced the ruling party will win no more than 35 per cent of the vote; GD, meanwhile, has claimed that its support stands at 60 per cent. There are few reliable published surveys, but analysts familiar with internal polling for both sides say the election is finely balanced, with everything dependent on turnout. The country has a fully proportional electoral system, but a 5 per cent threshold for parliamentary representation poses a challenge for smaller parties and could deliver victory to GD.
President Zourabichvili says the government has been strong-arming public servants to back it, roughing up opposition activists, bullying the media, discrediting democracy activists and making it hard for the Georgian diaspora to vote. Pro-democracy NGOs are scrambling to send observers to more than 3,000 polling stations. Yet GD’s control of the central election commission and judiciary are fuelling suspicions that it will fix the vote.
Georgia has a history of democratically elected leaders turning autocratic before they are removed from power. Eduard Shevardnadze was toppled in the Rose Revolution in 2003. Saakachvili’s reformist government ended up as a police state and was defeated in the 2012 election when Ivanishvili united the opposition against him. Now it is Ivanishvili’s turn.
“This time we’ve seen Georgian Dream really digging in, clinging to power by any means, and there’s no guarantee that if there is a 50-50 election where they’ve lost the majority that they’ll play fair,” says Tom de Waal, a Caucasus expert at Carnegie Europe, a foreign policy think-tank.
GD’s bombastic anti-western rhetoric took a more drastic turn this year after Ivanishvili returned to the political fore. A reclusive figure with eccentric interests — he has kept a pet shark and once imported giant baobab trees from Kenya for his private arboretum — he is surrounded by yes-men and shielded from reality, according to analysts.
People who have known the billionaire at different stages of his career say he seems susceptible to conspiracy theories. Giga Bokeria, who served as his national security adviser and is now an opposition politician, recalls Ivanishvili asking a “personal question”: was Israel’s foreign intelligence service Mossad responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks on the US?
“He is the loneliest man in the Caucasus,” says Hans Gutbrod, professor of public policy at Ilia State University in Tbilisi.
Ivanishvili began promoting the “global war party” phrase last April, during a speech accusing western powers and their “agents” of trying to seize control of his country. According to Gutbrod, this is not mere rhetoric: “My strong sense is that Bidzina actually believes in the ‘global war party’ and believes people are out to get him.”
Top of Ivanishvili’s list has been Washington. According to Irakli Kobakhidze, his prime minister, Ivanishvili believes that the US is somehow involved in his long-running dispute with Credit Suisse, which he claims defrauded him of nearly $1bn (a court found in his favour, but the case is on appeal). This has led to a breakdown in relations with the Biden administration.
Yet in that Imedi TV interview, Ivanishvili said he was ready to make peace with the US, saying “the reasons [preventing it] have resolved themselves”.
Unlike Moldova’s pro-Russian opposition, Ivanishvili is not overtly doing Putin’s bidding. Yet Ivanishvili spent his formative years in the brutal world of Russian business during the 1990s, where he made his fortune from computers, banking and heavy industry.
The extent of his ongoing contacts is a matter of dispute. He has sold his Russian businesses, but an investigation by Transparency International Georgia found that he owned at least one business in Russia through offshore companies.
“There is no evidence that he’s had any contact with any political leader or any leader in Russia,” insists Samkharadze, the GD MP, describing accusations as “cheap propaganda”.
Yet Victor Kipiani, a lawyer who formerly represented Ivanishvili, suggests the situation is more nuanced. “I’ve never seen any evidence that anyone in Georgian Dream receives instructions [from Moscow],” he says. “However, there is some marriage of convenience that arrives at the coincidence of interests with Russia.”
The GD government has declined to adopt western economic and financial sanctions against Russia and refused entry to Russian opposition politicians. This showed a “degree of co-ordination”, says Carnegie Europe’s De Waal, but Ivanishvili has tried to keep the Kremlin at arm’s length. “I would describe it as an appeasement policy towards Russia rather than an alignment policy,” he adds.
On Moscow’s part, the former national security adviser Bokeria said it was not as if the Kremlin had to issue orders to the Georgian government.
“They increased economic dependency on Russia and allowed Russian penetration of the security and political structures. That’s all they needed.”
Georgia’s president, along with the opposition and civil society activists, have set out to frame the elections as a referendum on the country’s future European integration.
Their calculation is that once a clearly pro-EU population — an estimated 80 per cent of Georgians support membership — understands that the country is veering in the wrong direction, they will vote against the GD government. Opposition parties hope to capitalise on the energy of young people in cities who turned out in their hundreds of thousands to protest against the NGO law.
“People are ready to fight for their choice because it’s not a party choice,” says Khoshtaria, co-leader of Coalition for Change. “They understand they are losing their own future.”
With the election fast approaching, EU officials have issued increasingly stark warnings that Georgia’s accession is at risk if voters back a party whose actions are incompatible with the bloc’s values. Last week, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said Saturday’s vote was a “moment of truth”.
Policymakers are baffled that the election still seems so close. One reason, suggests Gutbrod, is that GD voters may not regard EU accession as a priority: they perhaps want to wait for the bloc to evolve into the more socially conservative model advocated by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, an ally of Ivanishvili.
Another is that Georgia’s fractious opposition, for all that it is temporarily united, is tainted by the presence of Saakashvili, a highly divisive figure revered by fellow reformers but reviled by victims of his anti-corruption purges and increasingly repressive regime.
Notably, Saakashvili’s UNM party has resisted President Zouribchvili’s push, should GD lose, for all four opposition groups to back an interim technocratic government tasked with getting Georgia’s EU accession back on track.
Some Georgians, meanwhile, blame the EU. “No one paid proper attention,” says Tengiz Pkhaladze, a former Georgian official now at the Brussels-based European Centre for International Political Economy think-tank.
While Washington has taken punitive actions — imposing sanctions on law enforcement officials for their repression of anti-government protests and withdrawing an invitation from the prime minister to a US reception during the UN General Assembly — the response has hardly been muscular.
“There has been a drift into the Kremlin orbit,” says Giorgi Kandelaki, a former opposition MP who is now director of the Soviet Past Research Laboratory, a human rights group.
A GD rally in central Tblisi on October 23 drew tens of thousands of people, many of them state employees. Giorgi, a hierodeacon at Holy Trinity Cathedral, the main cathedral of the Georgian Orthodox Church, also in his 60s, was present. These elections are pivotal, he says. “If the Georgian Dream doesn’t win, I don’t know what will happen to Georgia.”
Vano, 41, the owner of a construction business who didn’t attend the rally, expresses a different view. He used to support GD but has changed his mind. “They’ve been in power too long; it’s time for change,” he says.
Everts of the EUISS argues that the EU and its western partners need to prepare clearer and tougher responses if the election is indeed followed by a government crackdown. These could include the threat of personal sanctions against Ivanishvili and his circle, although Hungary is likely to veto such a move.
“We dropped the ball on Georgia,” Everts says. “We’ve been so focused on other crises that we let GD gradually take control of state institutions. It never seemed serious enough to focus and intervene. The next few weeks will determine whether it slips away or not.”
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