Why Georgians Won’t Give Up

Even as the ruling party has grown more repressive, the people have swarmed the streets in protest — every day. The protesters know the government’s true goal is to appease Russia, and they will never accept it.

By Ghia Nodia

March 2025

Since 28 November 2024, when Georgian prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that his government was suspending talks on joining the European Union, thousands of people have been gathering every day on Rustaveli Avenue, the main street of Tbilisi, the capital. Other cities have street protests too, with crowds ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Never a day is missed.

The two most conspicuous features of this protest movement are its leaderlessness and its peacefulness (save for the first couple of weeks when the police attacked protesters, and the protesters fought back). For better or worse, the formal political opposition plays no role. The protests are mainly organized through social networks. Some consider this a weakness as there is no clear strategy. On the other hand, the “distributed mode” may make the movement more sustainable: There is no single head for the government to cut off.

Even for Georgians, with their robust record of street protests, the current stretch is unusually long. The development that has triggered the demonstrations is also unusual, and highly significant: The ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party and its billionaire leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, have made a political U-turn, abandoning Georgia’s traditional pro-Western foreign policy and opting for appeasement of Russia. The party has also drastically curtailed democratic freedoms and moved Georgia toward full autocracy.

This amounts to changing the country’s identity. Until recently, almost all Georgians took it for granted that it was their country’s strategic aim to become a European-style democracy and join key Western institutions, such as the EU and NATO. This was an object of broad political consensus, supported by the vast majority of the public and at least declaratively shared by all political players of any consequence. Such an aim was based not only on an expectation of specific benefits (however important they might be) but on a belief that Europe is where Georgia essentially belongs.

The protesters’ main demand is fresh parliamentary elections under new and fairer conditions. It is widely accepted that the October 2024 elections were rigged, and they received scathing assessments from international observers. All opposition parties are boycotting Parliament; they, as well as people protesting in the streets, do not consider the GD government legitimate.

This leaves both sides little room to maneuver. For the government, accepting the demand for fresh elections would amount to admitting that the recent polls were rigged — a huge concession that would pave the way to regime change. For the public, the protests represent the last chance to save the country’s true sovereignty and its citizens’ liberty. People believe that if they give up now, Georgia will become like Belarus, with no space for civil society or political contestation.

Toward Full Autocracy

The GD government has already taken many specific steps in an autocratic direction. Chief among these so far has been the Foreign Agents’ Law that Parliament passed in May 2024 despite massive protests. This law, modeled on Russian legislation, deems any independent civil organization receiving foreign funding to be the agent of a foreign government. Spokesmen for GD charge that foreign (in other words, Western) donors finance Georgian organizations only for the sake of toppling the government and dragging the country into a war with Russia. Under President Vladimir Putin, such a law became the first step in a campaign to destroy Russian civil society. There is every indication that GD is pursuing the same aim in Georgia.

This is far from all. The GD government openly avows that it means to outlaw the political opposition. An ad hoc parliamentary commission has been created to investigate the “national treason” that the UNM (the ruling party from 2004 to 2012 and now a key opposition formation) allegedly committed by resisting Russia’s 2008 invasion of portions of Georgia. This “crime,” GD mouthpieces hint, is not unlike what President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and his government are perpetrating right now by battling Putin’s invaders. The investigation is meant to lay the groundwork for banning the UNM. The Constitutional Court will be expected to go along. The GD leaders also make it clear that the ban will extend to UNM “satellites” or “heirs,” by which the government means any opposition group that genuinely confronts the government. A pliant “loyal opposition” will be preserved to maintain a democratic façade.

The government has also created a commission to study the overhaul of the university system. As in many countries, students in Georgia are a main source of protest. Ivanishvili seems to believe that this is because their professors — the present author possibly included — put wrong ideas into their heads. Existing law gives universities, whether private or public, wide autonomy. This is what GD plans to change. The plan for university reform has not been announced yet, but one can hardly doubt that curtailing university autonomy will be its guiding principle.

On April 1, a further package of repressive legislation was adopted. Among other things, leaders of civic organizations that receive foreign funding but refuse to register as foreign agents may face up to five years in prison; the government-controlled Communications Commission is to regulate broadcasters’ content — which means censorship. In addition, an amendment to the criminal code introduces the concept of treason, which is expected to be applied liberally to the opposition and government critics.

The GD government’s direction is the best explainer of the protests’ persistence. The Georgian political system, with its propensity to concentrate power around strong leaders, was never fully democratic. Yet over the course of thirty years, citizens became used to enjoying a high level of civic freedoms: Despite the imperfectly democratic regime under which they lived, nobody stopped them from organizing political parties or civic associations, from publicly criticizing the government, or from challenging it in the streets or in (often unfair) electoral contests.

The younger generation takes these liberties for granted, but it also knows that if the GD government is allowed to have its way, all this will soon be lost. People still argue about whether Georgia’s political regime will indeed go “full Belarus,” but everyone realizes that if the public is defeated now, there might not be another chance for a long time.

Prospects and Hopes

So far, the government is showing no sign that it will back down. This is not to say that it is unworried by what is going on. Opinion research shows that its supporters are deeply concerned and assess the situation as a crisis but distrust the opposition and continue to see GD as the guardian of stability.

The government is keen to break the protests and employs a broad array of repressive measures. In the first weeks, it used tear gas and water cannons. Numerous protesters were severely beaten — sometimes by the police, sometimes by hired thugs. This, however, only made people angrier and alienated some political neutrals. Later, the government switched to methods of attrition. Hundreds of activists were arrested on the barest pretexts or on no specific grounds at all. Many others were hit with hefty fines for the crime of blocking the streets: The fine is roughly equal to three times what the average Georgian makes in a month, and some individuals have been fined three or four times.

To counter this, several funds have been started with donations from citizens and likeminded businesses to help protesters pay fines and cover legal fees, and to aid families whose providers have been imprisoned. In mid-March, the government seized these funds on allegations of “financing violent activities and encouraging violation of law.”

Supposedly, these measures have made people think twice before joining a protest. Yet the will of the protest movement has clearly not been broken. The end is not yet in sight.

This does not mean that people see a clear path to victory, however. Global trends are not reassuring. While the protests are persistent, the numbers are not as high as one might prefer. Yet the protesters see grounds for hope.

One resource is international solidarity. The GD government’s policies have led to a total breakdown of relations with the West. Countries including the United States have sanctioned some of those responsible for persecuting protesters. Among those sanctioned is Bidzina Ivanishvili. This is a significant problem for GD because many of its supporters view strong relations between Georgia and the West as essential. Georgia’s European or Western identity is a deeply rooted idea, and GD even now cannot afford to reject it openly. Before the last elections, normalizing relations with the West was one of Ivanishvili’s chief promises. This promise even included Georgia joining the EU by 2028 or so. This is obviously not going to happen.

With the Europeans resolute in their condemnation of GD, the latter has pinned its hopes on the incoming administration of U.S. president Donald Trump. To attract his attention, GD stopped speaking of its struggle against the “global war party” and began talking instead about its fight against the “deep state.” Results have been zero so far, however.

The GD government’s record of flirting with China and Iran is not necessarily helpful either. On 27 March 2025, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed the MEGOBARI Act (the acronym means “friend” in Georgian). This bipartisan bill reaffirms support for the Georgian people (but not its government) and the country’s Euro-Atlantic integration, and includes provisions on further sanctioning of ruling-party officials. This has already ended the illusion that GD is heading toward normalizing relations with Washington.

The ruling party’s fundamental weakness is that its policies go against the core of Georgia’s national project as long understood and endorsed by most of its people. Therefore, GD must constantly hide its true intentions. It appeases Russia and may even, as many suspect, be coordinating policies with the Kremlin. But this is too unpopular to ever be done openly. The GD government has made the West an enemy, but cannot say so out loud because that would cut too hard against the view of most Georgians that Georgia is an essentially European country. The legitimacy deficit born of this dissembling is considerable.

Georgian politics are notoriously unpredictable. When GD declared victory after last October’s rigged elections and only lukewarm protests ensued, many believed that people had accepted their fate. That was only the quiet before the storm, however: In November came protests with renewed force. Today, it may seem unlikely that the GD government will be forced to make concessions. Yet people are hoping that unforeseen developments may turn the tide. The main thing, Georgians agree, is not to give up.

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 © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy

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