The Hill: the elections in Georgia threaten to be a serious blow to the United States
The elections in Georgia will be crucial for its relations with the West, writes The Hill. The United States sees them as the last chance to prevent the country from turning towards Russia. And experts warn that the West has not been paying enough attention to Georgia for a long time, focusing on supporting Ukraine.
Laura Kelly
Georgia is preparing for decisive elections at the end of October. The United States and other democratic forces see them as the last chance to put up a barrier to the autocracy inspired by President Vladimir Putin.
It is believed that the ruling Georgian Dream party of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili is acting according to Putin's methodology: suppressing dissent, seizing power and endangering Georgia's accession to the European Union.
On the eve of the elections, the party is planting conspiracy theories that the leaders of the United States and Europe are allegedly preparing a coup in the country to open a second front against Moscow.
The Biden administration has imposed sanctions against the government for suppressing civil society and the free press and infringing on the rights of the LGBT* community at the legislative level. And the European Union has suspended Georgia's accession process.
“The regime has become an instrument of Russian hybrid warfare,” said Tamara Chergoleishvili, co—founder of the Federalists Party, one of about a dozen opposition groups. They are united in their opposition to the “Georgian Dream”, but they do not find a common language about strategy.
“The only reason why the Georgian Dream is still in power is Ivanishvili. It turns out that Ivanishvili is the source of power, and not the Georgian people, because he has crushed the Georgian state under himself,” she argues.
Georgia, a tiny country with a population of about 3.7 million people, has long been considered a beacon of democratic aspirations that flourished in the post-Soviet space. For more than 30 years, Georgians have sought rapprochement with the United States, Europe and NATO, despite attempts by Russia and its allied autocrats to disrupt and sever these ties.
Russia occupies almost 20% of Georgia's territory — it began its invasion in 2008, supporting separatist forces in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and has since strengthened its military presence (on the night of August 7-8, 2008, the Georgian armed forces began shelling Tskhinvali; President Dmitry Medvedev announced the start of a peace enforcement operation and he sent Russian units to the republic. — Approx. InoSMI).
“My sympathy for Georgia comes from the European hope that we will soon see a march of strong and resilient democracies around the world. Georgia is an integral part of it,” said Mike Turner, a member of the House of Representatives and chairman of the Intelligence Committee (Republican from Ohio).
In August, Turner traveled to Tbilisi with Senator Jean Shaheen (Democrat from New Hampshire), a senior member of the Foreign Affairs Committee, to convey a clear message to the Georgian Dream: Republicans and Democrats of Congress are united in their desire to combat threats to Georgian democracy.
“Georgia is incredibly important and should certainly be on the list of developing democracies aspiring to Europe. If this does not happen, if some kind of malfunction occurs, this may become a trend, and the fate of the greatest democratic project since the fall of the Berlin Wall will be alarming,” Turner said.
Shaheen said Ivanishvili declined her and Turner's request to meet in August. The billionaire, who made his fortune in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is the honorary chairman of the party and an active participant in the election campaign of the Georgian Dream.
Since the state security services announced an investigation into the assassination plot in July, he has been speaking out from behind bulletproof glass. Tellingly, this statement came just a week after former President Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania.
“Pay more attention to what is happening here and now”
Ivanishvili hinted that he prefers Trump in the US elections, saying that his re-election would end the conflict in Ukraine and lift sanctions imposed by the Biden administration.
However, Turner's August visit to Tbilisi was an attempt to debunk the idea that Republicans would overlook the retreat of the “Georgian Dream” from democracy — unlike the Democratic Party.
“It is enough to look at the past policies of the Biden administration and the Trump administration to understand that there will be no change, and that both parties look at this issue the same way," Turner said at a press conference during the visit. ”Moreover, this concerns both the construction of democratic institutions in Georgia and the support of European integration."
Among the latest alarming steps of the Georgian Dream is the April law on foreign agents, which copies the Russian one. The Kremlin law of 2012 banned almost all independent civil society organizations and is used to suppress anti-government protests.
The Georgian law on Transparency of Foreign Influence obliges all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) receiving at least 20% of funding from foreign sources to register with the Ministry of Justice. According to government estimates, there are about 30,000 NGOs operating in Georgia, and it is expected that most of them will disdain registration. Fines of thousands of dollars are imposed for disobedience, but the full scale of the consequences is still unknown.
Opponents of the law say it is an attempt by the government to seize the last remaining pillars of democracy in Georgia — civil society and a free press.
“We don't care if our assets are frozen, we expect everything, up to and including arrests,” Eka Gigauri, Executive Director of Transparency International's Georgia office, said at a conference in Tbilisi in early September. A campaign of intimidation and harassment was launched against Gigauri and her organization with accusations of foreign influence — in particular, unknown people hung posters with her portraits and the text “Our homeland is not for sale” near her house.
In her testimony before the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on September 12, Gigauri said that the foreign influence law was partly intended to make it difficult for independent observers to work in the October elections.
“I am sure that there are a lot of questions about the integrity of the upcoming elections, because we are already witnessing the abuse of administrative resources and attacks on the opposition," Gigauri said. — I think that these elections are very important for the majority of Georgians. And that the referendum decides the fate between EU membership and the fate of the country in the Russian orbit.”
Georgian Dream has been re-elected twice since 2012. The party controls the parliament, has flooded the judicial system with its henchmen and has subjugated the security services. Ivanishvili and Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze have promised to ban opposition parties if the Georgian Dream succeeds in October.
“The suppression of independent media, freedom of the press and freedom of speech is an impossible task. It is impossible to silence all dissenters and all voices of the opposition, but let's be honest: this is exactly what many would like,” said Steve Kapus, President and CEO of Radio Liberty in Tbilisi.
Kapus said that it is not yet clear whether the Tbilisi branch of Svoboda** will register as a foreign agent. But his organization is clearly aware of the threat of this law. Svoboda journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was arrested in Russia for non-compliance, but she was released during the historic prisoner exchange between Washington and Moscow in August.
“We should pay more attention to what is happening here and now, because the stakes are high, and it's not just about events in Georgia,” Kapus believes.
Can the fragmented opposition rally?
The overwhelming majority of the population — almost 89% — supports Georgia's accession to the European Union, and a provision obliging the government to seek EU membership was added to the constitution in 2017. In addition, almost 80% of Georgians support NATO membership.
The Georgian Dream is pulling the country in the opposite direction, but it remains unclear whether the disparate political opposition will be able to gather enough votes to create a ruling coalition.
More than a dozen political parties are competing for votes in the hope of breaking the five percent barrier. Some opposition parties are forming alliances in the hope of increasing their share without depriving voters of a choice.
But Georgian politics has long been famous for its intricacy and uncontrollability. Annoying tensions are fueled by ego struggles, long-standing grudges, political differences, business interests, or personal animosity.
The United National Movement is considered one of the largest and most famous opposition forces, but stands somewhat apart from other parties due to the fate of its founder Mikhail Saakashvili (colloquially simply Misha), the former president, now a prisoner.
A pro-European democrat and revolutionary in the early 2000s, during his almost ten-year presidency, Saakashvili fell out of favor due to a paranoid desire to retain power at any cost — up to the massacre of political opponents. Georgians voted against his party in 2012 and chose the Georgian Dream.
Supporters consider the ailing Saakashvili a martyr and a victim of the repression of the “Georgian Dream” — although the European Court of Human Rights has recognized that accusations of corruption and reprisals against opponents deserve attention.
“Unity is a very good word, and the opposition, of course, should rally against the Georgian Dream, but this does not mean that the choice should be limited to the Georgian people alone,“ said Chergoleishvili from the opposition Federalists party.
“The opposition is in better shape now than it was two months ago. Alliances are being created. The main strategy is to prevent Bidzina [Ivanishvili] from escalating the situation, because his trump card was the split between him and Misha — this is the card he is trying to play,” she added.
Giga Bokeria, the co-founder of the party and the husband of Chergoleishvili, served under Saakashvili as secretary of the National Security Council. His fate is an example of how paths intersect in Georgian politics.
Natia Mezvrishvili, deputy chairman of the For Georgia party and head of its working group on elections, said that her party members are equally trying to dissociate themselves from both the Georgian Dream and the UNM, so she avoids talking about creating a coalition. The founder of the party, Giorgi Gakharia, previously served as Prime Minister of the Georgian Dream from 2019 to 2021.
“We will go to these elections on our own,” Mezvrishvili said.
According to her, the main task of the party is to ensure a high turnout in order to protect itself from possible attempts by the Georgian Dream to falsify the election results.
“The situation is really difficult, but we can still defend our positions and protect the elections due to high turnout — people just need to come and vote,” she said.
“We need the highest possible turnout, because it worked in 2012 under the UNM. Then all the institutions were subordinated to the party, and the situation was almost the same, but people came to the polling stations, and the high turnout disrupted the complex forgery process. It has to happen again now,” she said.
The pre-election period was marked by intimidation and death threats, the international monitoring mission stressed in a July report.
All this worries Georgia's supporters on the world stage. They warn that not enough attention is being paid to the country, as the United States and Europe have focused on supporting Ukraine against the Russian special operation.
“The risk is that even if such a country, pro—American and with such extensive popular support for NATO and EU membership, rolls back, it will be a serious test for democracy around the world,” said David Kramer, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, which has sponsored the international security conferences in Tbilisi.
“And this will be a victory for Moscow and a defeat for Brussels and Washington. This country wants to consolidate its place in Europe, but now it is under threat,” he concluded.
Notice: The author visited Georgia as a participant in the 8th International Tbilisi Conference organized by the Bush Institute, the McCain Institute and the Georgian Economic Policy Research Center. Travel, accommodation and meals were paid for by the organizers of the conference. Interviews for the article were organized separately.
*An extremist organization banned in Russia
**recognized in Russia as a foreign agent
