Even if you know nothing about the republic of Georgia and were completely unaware of its elections last week, the fact that Vladimir Putin is celebrating should be cause for concern.
Make no mistake about this: the Georgian elections held on 26 October were influenced by the Russian dictator which skewed the results in favour of the pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream party. Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili said on the day after the vote that “we were witnesses and victims of a Russian special operation.”
The stakes in the election could not have been higher. Georgia was for years a positive example of a post-Soviet state evolving into a modern liberal democracy. It was on the way to membership in both the European Union and NATO. But the increasingly illiberal views of the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili — whose “Georgian Dream” party has dominated the country since 2012 — have for now put an end to those dreams of a European future.
There is already a lot of evidence that the election was rigged — both on Election Day itself and in the run-up. The government’s decision to enact the repressive “Russian Law,” which labelled most civil society organisations as “foreign agents,” served to intimidate many who thought to challenge the ruling party. That party ran a campaign which played on Georgians’ fears of war, and of corrupting “Western” influences. On Election Day, thousands of foreign and domestic observers were present and there were a large number of reports of intimidation, bribery, ballot stuffing and, in some places, violence against opposition politicians.
The official announcement that Georgian Dream had won an outright majority sparked incredulity, and not only among the Georgians. The US and EU have expressed serious concerns about whether this was a free and fair election. But if Georgian Dream did win, part of the blame surely falls on the opposition itself. In previous elections, dozens of parties competed, leaving a fractured and weakened opposition. This time, under new election laws creating a 5% threshhold for parties to enter parliament, most parties joined one of four major blocs which failed to unite behind a single leader or platform.
A century ago, Georgia was briefly a democracy and had one of the most popular Social Democratic parties in the world — a party which won 70% of the vote in free elections. That party was so strong that it survived the first few years of Soviet Russian occupation, finally crushed following an armed rebellion in 1924.
A century later, the closest thing to a Social Democratic party is the “For the People” party, founded in 2021 and headed by Anna Dolidze — part of the “Strong Georgia” bloc. That bloc is headed up by a millionaire banker and won just 9% of the vote. The fractured nature of the opposition and the lack of a clear leader is a problem, but at least President Zurabishvili has stepped up to the task, refusing to accept the election results and calling for mass protests in the streets.
Time is running out for Georgian democracy. The ruling Georgian Dream party announced its intention before the elections to outlaw a number of opposition parties. The former president Saakashvili has been languishing in jail for several years. President Zurabishvili has warned that she expects to be arrested by the government if re-elected.
Mass protests have worked in Georgia’s past. The “Rose Revolution” of 2003, which brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power, began as a twenty-day long series of street protests against a fraudulent election result. Last year, demonstrations in the capital Tbilisi forced the government to stop the enactment of the hated “foreign agents” law — but only for a time.
Street protests alone will not bring an end to Ivanishvili and Putin’s dominance of Georgian politics. Only the creation of strong, values-based opposition parties, including a Social Democratic party, could do that. But with opposition parties refusing to take their seats in Parliament, civil society groups calling for the results to be annulled, and foreign pressure from Georgia’s allies in the West, there remains a glimmer of hope.
This article appears in this week’s issue of Solidarity.