There is scant common ground between Georgia’s ruling party and its rivals ahead of Saturday’s parliamentary election, but they agree on this: the strategic Black Sea state is at a crossroads and the “wrong” choice at the ballot box will invite disaster.
Georgian Dream, led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, warns that failure to extend its 12-year rule will hand the country to reckless and cynical opponents who would lead it back into conflict with Russia, its bellicose northern neighbour.
Opposition parties reject such claims as cheap scaremongering, and say the real threat comes from the oligarch Ivanishvili and allies who they see restoring Kremlin influence in Georgia and destroying its hopes of European Union membership.
Most polls suggest Georgian Dream will take more votes than any other single party but struggle to beat the combined haul of opposition groups that have put differences aside in the hope of forming the first coalition government in Georgia’s modern history.
“We need all four opposition blocs to maximise their results ... and then I’m sure we’ll have a majority and find the common ground and compromise to establish a well-working coalition government,” says Petre Tsiskarishvili, a senior member of the United National Movement (UNM), which ran Georgia from 2004 to 2012.
“It will be like baby steps for us, like democracy 101, because in more than 30 years of independence we’ve never had a coalition government. But we can do it, I’m sure,” he adds.
“Until now, our elections have been like a sumo bout, with two huge players and one throwing the other out. Now it will be more like a football match, and we have to get the right [team] score to win.”
One of the sumo wrestlers in his analogy is UNM, which took power in 2004 under former president Mikheil Saakashvili after the peaceful Rose Revolution ousted Georgia’s ex-Soviet old guard and aligned the country of 3.7 million people with the West.
The other is Georgian Dream, which defeated a jaded and discredited UNM in 2012 just months after it was launched by Ivanishvili, who grew up in rural poverty to become his country’s richest businessman in the risky and ruthless Russia of the 1990s.
The tycoon and his party have always insisted that they want Georgia to join the EU, but growing anger at home and mounting concern in Brussels over their perceived drift towards autocracy have come to a head in the run-up to the election.
The government this year curbed LGBT+ rights and forced civil society groups that receive funding from abroad to register as “agents of foreign influence”, under new laws that remind critics of measures imposed in authoritarian Russia.
Speeches by Ivanishvili and other top Georgian Dream figures now bristle with hostility towards the West, where they claim a shadowy “party of war” wants to drag Georgia into conflict with Russia to “open a second front” and ease pressure on Ukraine; they also hint darkly at western involvement in supposed opposition plots to violently replace the government with politicians more amenable to the EU and US.
In a pre-election interview aired on Georgian television this week, Ivanishvili (68) repeated a threat to ban the UNM and prosecute opponents after the election; Saakashvili has been in jail for three years on abuse of power charges and claims to be a political prisoner.
“There are [opposition] forces that are very dangerous for the country. It’s dangerous to keep them in politics. This is an evil force, enemies of the country. There are many global precedents for banning political parties,” Ivanishvili said, according to a translation in local English-language media. “If the tumour is not cut out, it will spread.”
Ivanishvili also closely echoed a Kremlin narrative by accusing the West of using Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia, just as he claimed it used Georgia when it lost a brief 2008 conflict with Moscow’s military over the breakaway region of South Ossetia.
“In Europe and America, they declare that Nato will not participate in the conflict with Russia. Georgia and Ukraine were prepared for this role; this was planned as far back as 2008,” he said. “Now, western politicians say they will provide Ukraine with weapons, money and all necessary resources but the manpower must come solely from Ukraine.”
Campaign posters ram home Georgian Dream’s message that a vote for the opposition would be fatal: bombed buildings and vehicles in Ukraine are shown beside their pristine equivalents in Georgia above the caption, “No to war! Choose peace”.
Georgian president Salome Zourabichvili said she had “never seen anything so shameful, so insulting to our culture, traditions, history and faith”, and EU ambassador to Tbilisi Pawel Herczynski called the billboards “outrageous, shameful and disgusting”.
The EU gave Georgia official candidate-member status last December but halted the process this summer and – along with the US – suspended some aid to Tbilisi due to what Herczynski described as a drift away from EU norms and values; he has also warned that visa-free travel to the EU for Georgians could be at risk.
Herczynski said this week that it was “heartbreaking and sad to see that other countries are moving forward in terms of integration into the European Union, and Georgia ... is moving away”.
Polls show that about 80 per cent of Georgians want to join the EU, and Georgian Dream insists it shares that aim, but wants membership to come “only with peace, dignity and prosperity”, as the slogan on another campaign advert puts it.
Senior Georgian Dream member Nikoloz Samkharadze claims the government has been “unfairly targeted” by the West for sticking up for itself and refusing to join sanctions on Russia that he believes would only damage the Georgian economy.
War in Ukraine and now the Middle East “basically reinforces our message to the public – that we should do everything possible in our hands to avoid any escalation in this country, because it might lead to war”, he says.
Samkharadze, the chairman of the foreign relations committee in Georgia’s parliament, also argues that the key sticking point with the EU is the so-called foreign agent law on NGOs.
“Let’s have a legal discussion about this law, take it to court, and whatever the court decides should be respected by Georgia and the European Union – and then we’ll go forward,” he says.
Georgian Dream says it expects to take more than 50 per cent of votes on Saturday, but Shota Utiashvili, senior fellow at the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies, believes most data points towards a win for the allied opposition.
“The opposition campaign is to portray this election as a choice between the West and Russia, and the ruling party says it’s a choice between war and peace,” he says.
“Georgian Dream’s campaign is that for as long as we’re in power there will be peace, that we might not be the best government but we can ensure peace ... This campaign is based on basic human instincts and it has been effective,” he adds.
“But I think they’ve abused this message over the past two years. Whenever there’s been a corruption scandal or something has gone wrong, they’ve said the alternative is war – and I think they’ve worn it out through constant repetition.”
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