Later this month the country will be holding an absolutely pivotal election. The stakes? Whether Georgia will remain anchored to the West or become Vladimir Putin’s newest satellite state.
By Ghia Nodia
October 2024
On October 26, the Republic of Georgia will hold its parliamentary elections. The contest promises to be pivotal. Its outcome will determine not merely who will hold office, but what kind of country Georgia will become.
If the results favor Georgian Dream (GD), the incumbent ruling party created and led by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a controversial billionaire who made his fortune in Russia, the election will mark the end of Georgia’s traditional policy of European and Euro-Atlantic integration and effectively move the country into the camp of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Georgia would then be set on a path to autocratic consolidation: GD has been open about its plans to extinguish civil society, and has been quick to condemn political critics and independent media outlets as agents of hostile foreign influence.
If the parties and blocs that make up the opposition win, Georgia will return to policies aimed at making it part of the West. The country will regain a chance of joining the EU along with other candidates such as Moldova and Ukraine. The political system will be much more pluralistic, civil society will be out of danger, and the government will be expected to get serious about addressing the politically pliant judiciary, weak local government, and other challenges that Georgia’s democracy faces. The stakes could hardly be higher.
How Did Georgia Get Here?
Georgia has never been a full democracy, but for most of the time since its independence in the early 1990s, it displayed the strongest commitment to democratic norms of any country in its neighborhood. Nonetheless, each change of government — whether it came by voting or revolutionary upheaval — always resulted in a dominant-party system centered on a strong leader such as Zviad Gamsakhurdia, Eduard Shevardnadze, Mikheil Saakashvili, or, most recently, Ivanishvili. Checks and balances never worked. Yet through it all, opposition groups could always meaningfully challenge the government, independent media recognized no political taboos, and civil society was capable and vibrant. In essence, Georgian society was free even as civil society struggled to organize itself into strong intermediary institutions capable of holding the powerful to account.
Georgia also stood out for its commitment to joining the West. Public-opinion polls from the past twenty years show a steady 70 to 80 percent of Georgians favoring EU and NATO integration. Amid all of Georgia’s political contentions, this backbone of consensus has remained strong. Moreover, support for Western integration and a relatively free political environment reinforced each other. No matter how much power any government gathered, its autocratic instincts were restrained by the imperative needs to stay friends with the West and make progress toward EU and NATO integration.
In 2012, when GD came to power with Ivanishvili at its head, many hailed its electoral victory as a democratic breakthrough. Quite a few had doubts about the true intentions of the party’s peculiar and secretive leader, but most Western analysts and politicians, and many locals, believed that Georgia was on the right track. The growth of disappointment was gradual until Russia invaded Ukraine. At that point, GD’s rhetoric took a sharp turn against the West, which it alleges is ruled by a secret “Global War Party” that wants to drag Georgia into a conflict with Russia.
At the same time, the government’s autocratic inclinations became more obvious. In May 2024, GD and its smaller allies in Parliament ignored huge street protests and passed a law, modeled after one in Russia, that declares NGOs and media receiving Western funds to be “foreign agents.” GD also accuses its opponents of being fifth columnists who serve the United States and Europe. The party campaigned on promises to solve these fabricated problems by banning the opposition parties, among other things.
If Georgians are so committed to being part of the West, why have they tolerated the GD government for so long? Why does a third of the electorate still support GD? There are several reasons, but the most important is the issue of peace. GD’s central message is that the elections present a choice between war and peace. GD claims to be the only guarantor of peace, while its opponents constitute the party of war.
The message works because Georgians truly do feel vulnerable when they look at their giant northern neighbor. Under first the czars and then the Communists, Russia used to rule Georgia, it invaded independent Georgia in 2008, and it currently sponsors two separatist ethnic enclaves on Georgian soil. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine drove this sense of vulnerability to new heights. While many Georgians express solidarity with Ukrainians, they also fear that their small country of about 3.6 million people may become Putin’s next target.
At the helm of GD, Ivanishvili has skillfully weaponized this anxiety. As he repeatedly claimed that the Georgian government of the day had been to blame for Russia’s 2008 invasion, Ivanishvili was in effect also blaming Ukrainians for Russian aggression against their country. He alleged that both had brought Russian armed intervention down on their own heads by prioritizing EU and NATO integration. By this logic, appeasing Moscow with anti-Western policies is the only guarantee of peace.
Oddly, GD denies that it is anti-Western and even promises to lead Georgia into the EU by 2030. The party knows that the vast bulk of Georgians want to be part of Europe and hate the idea of becoming a Russian satellite, so a certain amount of fancy rhetorical footwork is in order. GD takes care of the contradiction by telling its supporters that after kindred spirits such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, and Marine Le Pen come to dominate Western politics, harmony with the West will be restored.
All this demonstrates how much the fate of Georgian democracy is tied to global and regional geopolitics. Ivanishvili has set his course according to his belief that Russia will grow stronger while the West grows weaker; he plans to take this imagined geopolitical tide at the flood. This trend also happens to benefit him: In the Russian world, he can keep power indefinitely. The outcome of the war in Ukraine will have repercussions not only for Georgia’s security but for its democracy as well.
Who Will Win?
There are relatively few public-opinion polls in Georgia, and their credibility often comes under question. The most reliable, however, show that somewhere between 30 and 35 percent of the electorate support GD. By those numbers, GD will come first in the elections, but, in a fully proportional system, will not win a majority of Parliament’s 150 seats. In the past, GD always outperformed the polls, but this time the deficit may prove too high.
Still, many who crave change are cautious in their optimism. One reason for this is the perceived fecklessness of the opposition, which is divided and lacks popular, charismatic leaders. Experience suggests to many Georgians that only a united opposition with a strong leader at its forefront can have a good chance of winning. Most Georgians wanted the pro-European opposition to form a single electoral bloc, but rivalries and mistrust have left the opposition fractured. The GD also has a lot more money, and has run a higher-profile and more dynamic campaign.
On the bright side, the bulk of the opposition has managed to sort itself into four large parties or blocs, and all seem to have a realistic chance of clearing the 5 percent threshold necessary to enter Parliament. The United National Movement (UNM), the party of former president Mikheil Saakashvili, who is currently in prison, is polling near 20 percent, which makes it the strongest in the opposition but no longer its dominant part. The shift is important because many voters who oppose GD also oppose Saakashvili’s return to power. GD likes to present the contest as a race between itself and the UNM. This is clearly false, however, since other parties include varied combinations of politicians who were formerly associated with the UNM, with GD, or with neither party.
Thus organized, the opposition has a good chance of winning. Lingering doubts may stem from different factors. People may not believe polls because they have not been good predictors of election results in the past. Polling fails to account for unfair tactics such as voter intimidation, vote buying, and fraud — all of which GD has used before. Some think that even if GD loses, it will refuse to acknowledge defeat. It is the first Georgian government that can afford to ignore Western opinion, so it can make its electoral misconduct more blatant. If the public has grounds to believe that the election was stolen, they will take it to the streets. But the government has ignored large-scale protests before. And recent events in Venezuela demonstrate that dictators may get away with openly defying election results.
Some are unsure whether, if they do win the most seats, the opposition parties will be able to form a government. There is the history of their own fractiousness, and Ivanishvili has money in amounts that may prove large enough to buy defectors.
President Salome Zurabishvili, who has become an open foe of GD, has tried to mediate between opposition groups. She proposed a unifying document known as the “Georgian Charter,” and all the major opposition parties have signed it. Among other things, the document proposes creating a temporary parliamentary majority and a technical government that will repeal the most pernicious of GD’s laws and prepare for fair and competitive elections in the next two years. The Georgian Charter may ease the challenges of coalition formation.
Georgia has never had a coalition government, so doubts are understandable. Yet if there is a way out of the endless round of dominant-party regimes, this is it. If the opposition wins, there will for a while at least be no single party or leader to lord it over all others and run the show. Instead, rivals will have to team up. Nobody knows how that will work. But if it does, it will present a significant sign of democratic maturity.
All things considered, cautious optimism may be the prevalent mood among the majority of Georgians who hope for democracy-friendly change. Whatever happens, one thing is certain: Georgia will not be the same after these elections — for better or for worse.
Ghia Nodia is professor of political science at Ilia State University and director of the Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy, and Development in Tbilisi, Georgia. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Democracy.
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Giorgi Arjevanidze/AFP via Getty Images
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