What are we seeing in Georgia? That is not an easy question to answer, but I think it is the moment at which the government of a functioning democracy crosses the line to illegitimacy and autocracy. That transition can be hard to spot in real time. Governing young states tends to get messy, and even authoritarian regimes claim democratic legitimacy, including the one Russian President Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia, and Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) in China. Yet at some point, those claims became transparently meaningless. That is happening in Georgia.
It is easy enough to see when an unpopular leader, such as South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, declares martial law for no genuine reason. His attempt on Tuesday last week at what amounted to a constitutional coup failed and impeachment awaits him. Yet if that is the political equivalent of an open declaration of war, Georgia’s evolution is more akin to hybrid warfare, where the subversion of institutions and rights is more surreptitious and is conducted in their name.
A tipping point came this week, when authorities in the capital, Tbilisi, sent masked police to raid the headquarters of opposition parties, carry off their files and arrest a party leader who had the temerity to object. Security officers also waited for political activists outside their homes and bundled them into cars, presumably for detention. Those were the actions of a police state. The government sought to justify the move by saying it had information these people were planning a violent insurrection, making the raids and arrests “preventative.”
That is not, of course, impossible; the most developed democracies struggle with crowd control. Yet it is also highly implausible, because of everything else the government has done before. For one thing, it has jailed the only Georgian leader ever to acknowledge defeat in an election and hand over power in a peaceful transition — former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili — and seemingly thrown away the key.
It also takes its orders from an unelected multibillionaire, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his money in Russia. He chairs and funds the ruling Georgian Dream party. This year, he has also adopted the Kremlin’s entire, conspiratorial, anti-Western lexicon, now keenly parroted by his government. As part of that, it is portraying some of the largest protests the country has ever seen as the work of foreign agents and violent saboteurs.
Then there are the constitutional issues. Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, whose role is now largely symbolic, applied for Georgia’s constitutional court to review the results of Oct. 26 parliamentary elections, based on allegations of failure to open polling stations for voters abroad, vote buying and contraventions of ballot secrecy. The court — with two dissenting opinions — rejected the case on Tuesday last week on largely jurisdictional grounds, saying it had not looked at the substance of the evidence. According to the official election results, Georgian Dream won the vote by 54 percent to 38 percent for the combined opposition.
On Saturday, Zourabichvili is to be up for re-election, but for the first time that would not be decided in a popular vote, but by an electoral college. Half of the 300 electors would be members of parliament, so she is very likely to lose. She has said she would not stand down, because the parliament is illegitimate. It is hard to know the truth of the fraud allegations without an independent inquiry, which has yet to take place and at this point likely never will.
A non-binding European Parliament resolution on Nov. 28 called for a rerun of the vote. In response, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze suspended EU membership talks until 2028, triggering mass protests.
It is here that I think the government gives away the nature of its pantomime democracy. Georgian Dream ran for re-election claiming that a Global War Party had forced Ukraine to fight Moscow and was now trying to do the same to Georgia. The party paid lip service to their nation’s aspirations to join the EU, the actual reason for which Russia turned on Ukraine in 2014, because polls routinely showed that more than 80 percent of the population say they want to do so. And yet, every move it has made over the past year has seemed tailored to ensure that cannot happen.
The European Parliament has no sway over foreign policy, so its resolution was symbolic. Nevertheless, Kobakhidze used that hot air as an excuse for his very real decision to bury the wishes of his own electorate, in deference to his boss Ivanishvili and to Moscow.
In his statement announcing the delay, he continued to pretend commitment to the eventual goal of EU membership, which is written into the Georgian constitution, but the veil has fallen. That is why Georgian ambassadors are resigning from their posts and the streets of cities across the country are filled night after night by young protesters, who see their hopes for the future slipping away. To dismiss these people as foreign tools or criminals as the government has done is the deepest and most cynical of insults. They are fighting to achieve what the ruling party says it also wants, but clearly does not.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
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