Where Georgia Stands
Much More Than You Wanted to Know about Georgia
Amidst the insane martial law/coup attempt in South Korea and the recent ruling in Romania to suspend the results of the first round presidential elections, political science students have been having a field day. But there are a few of us under additional stress because we’re from a country invaded by Russia after undergoing a pro-Western revolution. The country in question is not Ukraine, but rather Georgia. Over the past eight days Georgia has been going through the largest wave of protests over at least the past fifteen years.
For those of you completely unaware of these events, I will briefly explain both recent Georgian history and where things stand now. If you are already familiar with Georgia’s recent history or uninterested in the previous political context, you can skip ahead to the last section.
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be in the EU
Starting from the late nineties, Georgians have wanted to align themselves with the West. This meant joining the EU and NATO. Americans may find this puzzling, but for Eastern Europeans the logic is completely obvious - NATO provides security guarantees against a highly aggressive neighboring Russia which has invaded Georgia multiple times. As for the EU, it provides access to an extremely lucrative common market where a properly functioning system can reap tremendous economic gains.
Georgia started accelerating towards these goals after the 2003 Rose Revolution which brought the United National Movement and Mikheil Saakashvili into power. UNM ruled the country from 2004 to 2012 and this remains the most controversial period in the country’s recent history. UNM took over a failed state with faltering electricity and made it (mostly) livable. They prided themselves in Georgia’s top 10 spot in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings and the country’s double-digit economic growth. In contrast, their opponents pointed to an increasing authoritarian streak which saw the government violently break up protests and storm opposition TV channels. By 2008 Georgian President Saakashvili had befriended George W. Bush enough that Bush strongly pushed for bringing Georgia into NATO at the Bucharest Summit. Bush was rejected by then German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Within a few months, Russia invaded Georgia and recognized the independence of Georgia’s two separatist regions Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The goal was to create a territorial conflict that would make Georgia's NATO accession as difficult as possible. To this end, Russia mostly succeeded.
Fast forward a few years later and Saakashvili’s luck started to run out. Liberals were bothered by his authoritarianism and conservatives could see that he was not one of them. Eventually a billionaire by the name of Bidzina Ivanishvili emerged and created a party (and coalition) named Georgian Dream. Ivanishvili’s wealth meant that he was able to better centralize the opposition against the UNM and won the 2012 parliamentary election.
Georgian Dream Stage 1: 2012-2022
There is a lot to be said about the first 11 years of GD’s rule, but I will try to keep things as brief as possible.
Despite having full political control, Ivanishvili soon “left” his position as Prime Minister of the country and only took part in major decisions by calling up other party leaders. He has at different points reappeared in the public, but usually prefers to keep a low profile.
Foreign policy became much more conciliatory towards Russia, with the country’s general stance resembling appeasement. Simultaneously, the Georgian Dream of 2012-2022 maintained plausible deniability with respect to the West and managed to obtain a free trade agreement with the EU and even a visa-free regime.
The country’s economic growth slowed down to an usual average of 5%. A strong number for developed countries, but mediocre for a poorer state like Georgia.
GD prosecuted its political predecessor - this meant jailing major UNM figures such as former Tbilisi mayor Ugulava, former Prime Minister Merabishvili, and of course, former President Saakashvili (whose arrest remains a story for the ages).
GD maintained power by scaring the population that the UNM could come back. They never managed to create a strong ideological base. They also never had a strong base of supporters who loved GD. Their electorate was a combination of public sector employees, UNM-haters, and people they bribed.
The strongest pro-EU advocates slowly began to leave GD. The most important members to turn on the party include former Prime Ministers Giorgi Kvirikashvili and Giorgi Gakharia alongside Presidents Giorgi Margvelashvili and Salome Zourabichvili. This, by the way, is the biggest red flag for any political movement, regardless of the country it is centered in.
Georgian Dream Stage 2: 2022-2024
Things began to take a sharp turn for the worse after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. GD began making insane statements implying that the West was attempting to drag Georgia into the war for a “second front”. After a while their conspiracy theories became so bad that there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to it now. GD basically believes that: (1) there is a “Global War Party” out there seeking to drag Georgia into the war in Ukraine (2) every other Georgian political party is controlled by the GWP (3) the GWP also has influence over NATO, the EU, and the Biden administration (4) the one man who can stop the GWP is Donald Trump.
Yeah. Does GD believe any of this? Most of them probably do not, but the dumber members of the party probably do. The most important question is whether Ivanishvili believes in all this. We’ve heard many insiders mention that he has zero understanding of political institutions and that he believes that Mossad did 9/11. Anyway, starting from 2022 things got extremely bad.
In addition to the terrible rhetoric, GD attempted to introduce a “foreign agents law” in 2023. GD’s argument was that the law would just force non-governmental organizations to register as “foreign agents” if they received more than a certain share of their income from foreign sources. In reality the law allowed GD to shut down any NGO they wanted to investigate. There were huge protests against it in 2023 which led GD to withdrawing the law and promising not to bring it back. This was thought of as a huge victory for the pro-EU team in the country with Georgia receiving EU candidate membership at the end of the year. And as the country entered the start of 2024, GD appeared invincible. The opposition was in disarray and they had just received some legitimacy from the West, what ever could go wrong?
On December 31st 2023 Ivanishvili declared that he was “returning” to politics. Soon enough he replaced the Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili with Irakli Kobakhidze. And in just a few months GD re-introduced the foreign agents law. This was met with even larger protests than last time, with close to 150 000 Georgians coming to protest in May. Unfortunately the government decided to ram through the law and go ahead to the elections.
The Election
By Summer of 2024, GD seemed to be in trouble. There were four clear coalitions opposing them for the election with all four on track to pass the 5% threshold. The West signaled very strongly that Georgia would have no shot at EU membership if GD stayed in power. The country’s president also supported the opposition. GD would have to over-perform its 2020 result in order to win. That seemed extremely unlikely given their anti-Western turn over the last four years coupled with losing around 200k voters to their former Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia.
Come election day, Edison Research’s exit polls show GD losing the election with 41% of the vote. Edison Research was historically accurate in its Georgian exit polls, only missing by ~2-3% in the last 12 years of elections. HarrisX gave a similar number of 42%. Just a few hours later, the Central Electoral Commission declares that GD received 54% of the vote. The first reaction was shock, the numbers made no sense. The second reaction was to try and explain what had happened. I will spare you the details, but it seems as if GD managed to pull off an impressive scheme that included (1) taking passports from voters (2) having their supporters vote at multiple locations with different passports (3) voting for people who were not even in the country.
The country’s President immediately denounced the results as fraudulent and protests began to emerge. Unfortunately, the protests here were quite muted compared to what we had earlier in the year. It looked like GD was getting away with it.
The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back
On November 28, just as it looked like GD would face no threats to its power, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared that his government would not be focusing on EU accession until 2028. This was eerily similar to Yanukovich’s statement about not signing a free trade agreement with the EU 11 years prior. The population became outraged, especially because Georgia’s constitution has a clause stating that the government must do everything in its power to have the country join NATO and the EU. The government was in all respects violating the constitution.
Protests began immediately and have been going on since then. This has in fact been the largest wave of protests that I can remember with eight straight days of 50k+ people coming out. This is also the first time that government officials have felt pressure to resign. The country’s ambassadors to Lithuania, Czechia, Bulgaria, and the United States all resigned. The deputy foreign minister also left his post. There have been mass declarations from every government institution with around ⅓ to ½ of the staff declaring that they do not stand with the government’s statement. In other words, the country is in the middle of a preference cascade, with public sector employees realizing that they all detest what the government has turned into.
GD in turn has pretended that nothing is wrong. They have said that they will “sign” any document that the EU gives them to begin negotiations - all the while criticizing the protests as “foreign-led”. This, of course, failed. So they have switched to an alternative strategy of massive oppression: over the last 8 days they have arrested around 300 protesters with 250 reporting that they were heavily beaten. A 21 year-old is currently in a coma after being beaten by the secret police, while some journalists survived by pure luck that they did not fall into concrete after being hit in the head.
And this is where we are now, the government uses water cannons and tear gas to break up protests. People use fireworks to scatter the police and confuse them. Protestors have their homes invaded and are beaten upon arrest. And we are awaiting help from the West.
Georgian Dream may yet survive, but it is hard to believe how they can continue to run a country where they have such little support and such great opposition.
P.S. If you made it to the end of this piece and feel like supporting Georgia, please consider spending 5 minutes to contact your representatives in Congress so that they support the Megobari act.