Georgia’s ruling party crushes the country’s European dream

The election in Georgia on October 26th was a crucial moment for a country once hailed by the West for its democratic reforms. Its pro-European opposition saw it as perhaps the last chance to repair the damage done by the current anti-Western government and put the country back on track towards membership of the EU. That chance seems to be slipping away: official results showed a decisive victory for the ruling Georgian Dream party, with 54% of the vote. An alliance of four opposition parties took just 38%.

The opposition has refused to accept the results. They were a “total falsification”, said President Salome Zourabichvili, who is these days firmly aligned with the opposition. “No one has a right to take this European future away from us.”

A Georgian election-monitoring group, My Vote, says it identified a “scheme of large-scale election fraud”. It allegedly entailed a complex set of procedures to bypass the verification process, allowing an organised “carousel” of multiple voting to take place. Statisticians studying the results have found anomalies that indicate “widespread tampering in favour of the government”. Georgian elections have never been totally clean, but this would, if proven, amount to a new level of cheating. Still, there is no smoking gun yet, and with every day that passes opposition supporters are increasingly resigning themselves to another Georgian Dream term.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgian Dream has taken Georgia, once a loyal Western ally, into uncharted waters. The government adopted a neutral stance on the Ukraine war, angering its pro-Western citizens. It has veered towards authoritarianism, showing a new willingness to beat up and intimidate protesters and opponents. Although it applied for candidate status in the EU (and received it last December), it quickly set about sabotaging that accomplishment, in part by constantly criticising the West. Accession talks are now suspended.

The opposition parties consider all of this an embrace of the Kremlin. Their mantra was that the election was a choice between Europe and Russia. Georgian Dream’s campaign narrative also centred around the fear of Russia, in a rather different way. It promulgated an elaborate conspiracy theory, that a “Global War Party” from the West was trying to install the Georgian opposition in power in order to drag the country into war against Russia. In the closing days of the campaign the party launched a grisly ad campaign juxtaposing images of war-torn Ukraine with those of prosperous Georgia. “No War, Choose Peace”, read the ads.

The “choose peace” message may have resonated with voters. “We want Europe,” said Levan Kobaladze, a 60-something doctor, as he left a polling station on Tbilisi’s central avenue. “But Western countries, America, they just want to make you do what they want.” In the five-day war Georgia fought with Russia in 2008, he complained, Georgia’s Western allies did nothing to help. “Only promises, and because of these promises we already had war with Russia.” Now, he thinks, it is happening again. If Russia attacks, “in three days we will be absolutely destroyed. All Georgia will be in ruins.”

Russia has expressed satisfaction with the results, while America and the EU have registered objections over the reports of fraud and have demanded that the authorities investigate. But the Western response, which has not gone so far as to call the outcome illegitimate, has been too tepid for many opposition supporters. At a demonstration two nights after the election, one man held a sign, in English: “International society don’t leave us alone.”

The result in Georgia followed a referendum a week earlier in Moldova over whether it should formally aspire to join the EU. There a pro-EU amendment to the constitution eked out only a wafer-thin victory. It had been expected to pass comfortably. Maia Sandu, Moldova’s president, blamed a massive vote-buying scheme led by Russia. She herself performed worse than expected in the first round of a two-round presidential race, which concludes with a run-off on November 3rd.

What will happen next in Georgia? The scale of Georgian Dream’s victory has taken the wind out of the opposition’s sails. It has also blunted the international response to the fraud allegations; many assume that, even without the cheating, Georgian Dream would have won anyway. There are no more protests planned.

The pro-Western forces will need to regroup. Their message of choosing Europe over Russia did not assuage voters’ real fears of what might come from the north, says Kornely Kakachia, the head of the Georgian Institute of Politics, a Tbilisi think-tank. “They [Georgian voters] want Europe but they know that the threat is coming from Russia. How are you going to deal with this? And there was no answer.”

But Georgian Dream also appears to have come out of the election weakened by the appearance of fraud, says Mr Kakachia. Compared with its last win, in 2020, the party’s celebrations have been subdued. “Their legitimacy is contested internally as well as internationally. That’s a huge problem for them…because any major crisis can bring them down.”

After such a geopolitically fraught campaign, all eyes will be on Georgian Dream’s next foreign-policy moves. The first foreign leader to visit Tbilisi post-election was Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban. This was suggestive of the direction Georgia may take: still formally tied to the West, but nevertheless trying to play all sides. Europe will have its hands full. ■

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