Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the founder of the For Georgia party. It has been updated.
The country of Georgia is headed to a pivotal election at the end of October, a contest the U.S. and pro-democracy forces see as the last chance to stand up to aspiring autocrats inspired by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party’s billionaire founder and de-facto leader Bidzina Ivanishvili is viewed as employing Putin’s playbook to stifle dissent, consolidate power and jeopardize Georgia’s ascension to the European Union.
Ahead of the election, the party is promoting conspiracy theories that the U.S. and European leaders are working to institute a coup and push the country into opening a second-front of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The Biden administration has levied sanctions against the government for pushing legislation criticized as suppressing civil society organizations, the free press, and rolling back LGBTQ rights. And the European Union has halted Georgia’s accession to the 27-nation bloc.
“The regime is the instrument of Russia’s hybrid warfare,” said Tamara Chergoleishvili, co-founder of the Federalists party, one of more than a dozen political opposition groups which are united in their opposition to GD, but divided over a strategy to oust the ruling party.
“The only reason Georgian Dream is in power is Ivanishvili, and Ivanishvili is the source of power, not Georgian people because he has captured the Georgian state.”
Georgia, a tiny country of about 3.7 million people, has long been held up as a prime example of democratic aspirations blooming in post-Soviet states. For more than 30 years, Georgians have pursued closer ties with the U.S., Europe and NATO despite efforts by Russia — and allied aspiring autocrats in the country — to frustrate and sever those ties.
Russia occupies about 20 percent of Georgian territory — it launched an invasion in 2008 backing separatist forces in the territories of South Osettia and Abkhazia and has worked over the years to fortify its military presence in the areas.
“Georgia is incredibly important to be in the account log of emerging democracies heading toward Europe,” Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Hill.
“If that doesn’t happen, if that disruption occurs, that can be the trend, and we’ve got to be very concerned as to — how does that impact what really has been the great democracy project since the fall of the Berlin Wall?”
Turner traveled to Tbilisi in August with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to send a clear signal to Georgian Dream that Republicans and Democrats are united in Congress to push back on threats to Georgia’s democracy.
Shaheen said Ivanishvili rejected her and Turner’s request to meet in August. The billionaire, who made his fortune in Russia during the Soviet collapse, is the honorary chairman of the party and has become a fixture on the campaign trail for Georgian Dream.
He’s taken to speaking behind bullet-proof glass after the state security services announced in July it was investigating assassination plots, the announcement coming a week after former President Trump survived a gunman’s bullet at a rally in Pennsylvania.
‘More attention should be paid to what’s happening here now’
Ivanishvili has alluded to his preference for Trump in the U.S. election, saying his reelection would lead to the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine and reverse the sanctions issued by the Biden administration.
Turner’s presence in Tbilisi in August sought to dispel the notion that Republicans would be any softer on Georgian Dream’s democratic backsliding than Democrats.
“You only have to look to the past policies of the Biden administration and the Trump administration to see that there would be no change and that both policies of both governments were the same,” Turner said at a press conference during his visit. “And that is in building democratic institutions in Georgia and support of the European integration.”
Among the most concerning, recent actions taken by Georgian Dream is its pushing through legislation in April that mirrors Russia’s “foreign agents law.” The Kremlin’s 2012 law forced out nearly all independent civil society organizations and is used to suppress anti-government speech.
The Georgian law, called the “On Transparency of Foreign Influence,” requires any civil society or nongovernmental organization (NGO) that receives 20 percent of its funding from foreign sources to register with the Ministry of Justice. The government estimates there are about 30,000 NGOs operating in Georgia, and the majority of those organizations are expected to boycott registering. Failure to register will incur thousands of dollars in fines, but the full scope of consequences is not yet known.
Opponents of the law say it’s the government’s attempt to capture the last remaining democratic pillar in Georgia, civil society and the free press.
“We don’t care if our assets will be frozen, we expect everything — including arrests at some point,” Eka Gigauri, executive director of Transparency International Georgia, said at a conference in Tbilisi in early September. Gigauri, personally, and the NGO have been targets of an intimidation campaign with accusations of foreign influence — posters featuring Gigauri’s image are posted outside her home with text reading “Our homeland is not for sale.”
Gigauri testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sept. 12, where she said the foreign influence law is, in part, aimed at making it harder for independent organizations to monitor the October elections.
“I think of course there are many questions about the fairness of the upcoming elections because now we already observe the abuse of administrative resources, attacks on the opposition,” she told the panel. “I think for the majority of Georgians these are very crucial elections. And this is the referendum between the membership of the E.U. and to become the country which is under the influence of Russia.”
Georgian Dream, elected three times since 2012, holds the legislature, has infused the judiciary with loyalists and has control over the security services. Ivanishvili and Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze have vowed to ban opposition parties if Georgian Dream is successful in October.
“The crackdown on independent media, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, it is a mission impossible to silence all voices of dissent, all voices of opposition, but to be clear that’s what some people here would like to see happen to this place,” Steve Capus, president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), told the Hill in an interview in Tbilisi.
Capus said it’s not yet clear if RFE/RL, which runs a bureau in Tbilisi, has to register as a foreign agent in Georgia. But the full dangers of the law are crystal clear to the organization. RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva was arrested in Russia for failing to register as a foreign agent in October, and her release was accomplished in a historic prisoner exchange between Washington and Moscow in August.
“More attention should be paid to what’s happening here now, because the stakes are enormous and it’s not just about what happens in Georgia,” Capus said.
Can fractured opposition unite?
The overwhelming majority of the population — about 89 percent — supports Georgia’s accession to the European Union, with a provision mandating the government work toward joining the EU added to the constitution in 2017. And about about 80 percent of the population supports Georgia joining NATO.
But even as Georgian Dream drags the country in the opposite direction, it’s unclear if the disjointed political opposition can secure the votes to achieve a ruling coalition in the parliament.
There are more than a dozen political parties competing for votes to overcome a 5 percent threshold to enter parliament. Some opposition parties are making small alliances to try and increase their numbers without narrowing choices.
But Georgian politics are famously fractious, confusing, frustrating — tensions fueled by egos, long-standing grievances, political differences, business interests or personal distrust.
While the United National Movement (UNM) is one of the largest and well-known opposition parties, it is somewhat isolated among the other groups over the turn of its jailed founder Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president colloquially referred to as Misha.
Once heralded as a pro-European, pro-democratic revolutionary in the early 2000s, Saakashvili had a disturbing fall from grace during his almost decade as president, paranoid over maintaining power he lashed out at perceived political enemies. Georgians voted out his party in 2012, and voted Georgian Dream in.
Saakashvili’s supporters hold him up as a martyr to Georgian Dream’s crackdown — imprisoned and in poor health , despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling that cases against him for corruption and directing violence hold merit .
“Unity is a very good word and of course, the opposition should be united against the GD, but it doesn’t mean limiting the choice to Georgian people,” said Chergoleishvili, of the opposition Federalists party.
“The opposition is getting in better shape than it was two months ago. Some alliances are being made. The main strategy is that Bidzina [Ivanishvili] doesn’t manage to polarize the situation, because his winning ticket so far has been — and right now he’s trying to use this ticket — is to polarize the situation between him and Misha, that’s his best scenario.”
Chergoleishvili’s husband, Giga Bokeria, is the party’s co-founder and served under Saakashvili as the secretary for the National Security Council — an example of the overlapping ties of Georgian politics.
Natia Mezvrishvili, deputy chair of the For Georgia party and head of its election task force, said her party is equally trying to distance itself from Georgian Dream and UNM, so it has shunned talk of coalition building. The party’s founder, Giorgi Gakharia, served as prime minister representing Georgian Dream between 2019 and 2021.
“We are running in these elections independently,” Mezvrishvili said.
A priority focus for the party is to motivate voter turnout, she added, to serve as a guard against what she has warned is likely election-rigging by Georgian Dream.
“Despite this really difficult situation, we still can protect the results and we still can protect the elections by high turnout — people need to go and vote,” she said.
“We need the highest possible turnout because it worked in 2012 under the UNM leadership when they had all institutions subordinated to the party, it was almost the same situation, but people went to the polling stations and high turnout outweighed actually this complex process of rigging. That’s what can happen now.”
The preelection period is defined by intimidation and threats of violence, an international observation mission noted in a July report .
All of this is raising concern among Georgia’s international supporters, who warn there’s little attention on Georgia while the U.S. and Europe are focused on maintaining support for Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia.
“The danger is, if a country like this, with all the popular support for joining NATO, for joining the EU, being pro-American, if all that gets reversed, this is a really important test case of the decline of democracy around the world,” said David Kramer, executive director of the George W. Bush Institute, which has for eight years co-sponsored a global security conference in Tbilisi.
“And it will be a victory for Moscow, it will be a defeat for Brussels and Washington. It is a country that wants to secure its place in Europe and that ability to secure its place is in danger.”
Updated at 11:45 pm EDT on Sept. 16
Disclosure: The writer traveled to Georgia as a participant of the 8th International Tbilisi Conference, hosted by the Bush Institute, the McCain Institute and the Economic Policy Research Center in Georgia. Her travel, accommodation and meals were covered by the conference. Interviews for this article were organized independently.
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