The Georgian Dream Could Yet Become A Nightmare

Professor Thomas Fazi writes:

Food. Churches. Chacha. This is what Georgia has long been known for. But now this ancient country, flanked by the mountains and the sea in the heart of the Caucasus, is the battleground in a new Not-So-Cold War. Due to its strategic location — it shares a large border with Russia to the north — the country has found itself caught up in the geopolitical power play between the West and Russia. And just like the Euromaidan revolt in Ukraine a decade ago, Georgia’s domestic politics have been framed in Nato circles as an existential fight. On one side sits the Georgian Dream, the allegedly pro-Russian ruling party, in power since 2012. On the other sits the opposition, avowedly pro-Western and pro-EU.

Little wonder, then, that last week’s parliamentary elections have turned into a global event. As predicted by the polls, Georgian Dream won by a wide margin, securing over 53% of the vote. The four major opposition coalitions together managed less than 40%. There is no reason to believe that the vote was fixed: despite raising some concerns about pressure on voters, biased media coverage and an environment of political polarisation, independent observers found no evidence of electoral fraud, let alone of Russian interference.

Yet that doesn’t fit the geopolitical mood. Desperate to finally shut Russia out from its near abroad, there seems to be no line Western politicians and their allies in Georgia are unwilling to cross to achieve their geopolitical aims — including ignoring basic liberal principles and even overturning the will of the people wholesale. Dovetailed with ominously similar moves across the Black Sea in Moldova, meanwhile, and Tbilisi may not be the last capital to suffer.

Even if Georgia’s elections were almost certainly free and fair, the opposition has refused to accept defeat. They’ve accused the government of “stealing” the election as part of a “Russian special operation”. By Monday, thousands of pro-EU demonstrators had rallied outside the Georgian parliament. For its part, the opposition can count on a powerful ally within the Georgian state: the country’s staunchly pro-Western president Salome Zourabichvili.

Born in Paris, she’s spent most of her life working as a French diplomat, including as the country’s ambassador to Georgia. Yet despite only becoming a Georgian citizen in 2004, Zourabichvili was nonetheless confident that victory belonged to the opposition. “I do not accept this election,” she said. “It cannot be accepted, accepting it would be accepting Russia into this country, the acceptance of Georgia’s subordination to Russia.” Even more remarkably, Zourabichvili claimed that whether Russian interference could actually be proved didn’t matter. What was important, she said, was “what the Georgian population knows, feels and sees”.

If the roles were reversed, Western governments would rightly laugh off such claims as unhinged. Instead, they’re echoing her claims: Joe Biden expressed “alarm” at the election, while Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Charles Michel, president of the European Council, have both called for a probe into alleged irregularities.

Senior parliamentarians across the bloc have made similar noises. They’ve claimed that “these elections were neither free nor fair”, arguing that “the European Union cannot recognise the result” and demanding “personal sanctions” against government officials. Displaying a zero-sum mentality, typical of this new Cold War, they added “this election was about Europe or isolation, democracy or authoritarianism, freedom or Russification”, implying that Georgia was headed in the wrong direction. For his part, Boris Johnson has suggested that Georgian democracy was “stolen by Putin’s puppet government in Tbilisi”.

It’s hard to overstate how irresponsible these claims are. Consider, after all, what happened the last time Western governments forced a country geographically, politically and culturally split between Russia and the West to make a binary civilisational choice between the two. That was Ukraine — and look at the blood-stained consequences there. First: a Western-supported coup against a democratically elected government. Then: civil strife in the Donbas and outright war with Russia.

This is precisely the outcome that Irakli Kobakhidze and his Georgian Dream party are trying to avoid. The prime minister rejects the West’s “pro-Russian” labels, arguing instead that he’s just being pragmatic. Given his homeland’s history, size and geography, Kobakhidze says it makes no sense for Georgia to fully move into the Western sphere of influence, let alone sever ties with Russia altogether, or even worse adopt a confrontational attitude towards the latter. Indeed, the government has stressed the importance of having “normal, peaceful relations” with Russia.

Georgia has good reasons to play it safe. Economic data shows that increased tourism and trade with Russia, alongside strengthened ties with China, have played an important role in boosting the economy, which grew by 7.5% last year. Perhaps most crucially, though, his party’s imperative is avoiding war — that is, becoming a second front in Nato’s proxy war against Russia.

Claiming that Kobakhidze is merely a pro-Russian stooge simply reflects the West’s disconnect from reality, or outright bad faith. Though the war in Ukraine has certainly opened a rift between Georgian Dream and Brussels, the party has equally been clear that it’s eager for integration with Europe. This is certainly more than rhetorical: the party enshrined pursuing EU and Nato membership in the Georgian constitution, and submitted an application for EU membership in 2022. All Kobakhidze has requested in return is that Brussels plays “by Georgian rules” as Tbilisi journeys towards the promised land in Belgium.

In short, then, Georgian Dream’s geoeconomic platform can be summed up as follows: focusing on economic growth and preserving internal stability by maintaining friendly political and economic relations with both the West and Russia, and the wider non-Western bloc, while avoiding being drawn into external conflicts. Taken together, then, Kobakhidze’s hard-nosed approach can plausibly be compared to another Western bête noire: Hungary. No wonder Orbán was the first EU leader to travel to Tbilisi and congratulate Georgian Dream on its victory. “Nobody wants their own country to be destroyed and involved in war”, the Hungarian leader said. “Therefore, we understand the Georgian people’s decision to choose in favour of freedom.”

To quote Orbán, many Georgians seem happy not letting their country become a “second Ukraine” — while also pursuing a “multipolar” agenda elsewhere, notably partnering with China to build a strategic port on the Black Sea. Unfortunately, it seems like the West has other plans. Indeed, Washington and its allies seem to be applying the same playbook to Georgia as they did to Ukraine. Just as in the lead-up to the 2014 coup in Kyiv, they’re first denying the legitimacy of the elected government, accusing it of being a Russian pawn. From there, they’re using Western-funded “NGOs” to mobilise the pro-EU minority against the government, while also pushing for sanctions. If the government still doesn’t yield to the pressure, they’ll try to move to the next phase: unrest in parliament and on the streets; a hoped-for police crackdown; and ultimately the toppling of the government and the appearance of a friendly pro-Western alternative.

Certainly, influential Western foreign policy think tanks are already predicting exactly this scenario. In a recent article, the Atlantic Council argued that “Georgia’s 2024 parliamentary election has entered its ‘Maidan’ phase” — and that Western governments must “support the Georgian people in both the immediate period ahead and the longer term”. The Nato establishment’s aims couldn’t be clearer.

Yet in the event, fomenting a Ukraine-style “coup” in Georgia may prove challenging. That’s partly because most Georgians are determined to avoid this outcome, and partly because Kobakhidze has been “coup-proofing” the country for some time. In May, for instance, the government passed the “Transparency of Foreign Influence” law, mandating that any NGO receiving 20% or more of its funding from outside sources must register as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power”. The EU and US accused the bill of being a sign of Georgia’s “democratic backsliding” and “Russification” — and even imposed sanctions. Protests followed, some of which were joined by Western politicians, only fuelling the country’s political polarisation.

Yet as the Georgian government rightly points out, variations of its so-called “foreign agent” act already exist across the West. No less striking, there’s plenty of evidence that NGOs do play a nefarious role in the country’s politics: it’s just that they pursue pro-Western agendas. For one thing, there are the raw numbers. Though reliable data is hard to find — itself part of the problem — there are roughly 30,000 NGOs in Georgia. That’s a huge number for a country of less than four million people. Then there’s the question of funding. Most of Georgia’s charities are financed by the US, EU and other “philanthropic” institutions, notably George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

And while these varied organisations officially focus on innocuous topics such as democracy and human rights, it’s no secret that Western governments use them to push their own interests, up to and including regime change. Western-funded NGOs, for example, played a key role in fostering several “colour revolutions” in the early 2000s. That mostly involved non-violent protests, swiftly leading to pro-Western changes of government: especially in post-Soviet states like Ukraine (2004-5), Kyrgyzstan (2005) and even Georgia itself (2003).

It’s telling in this regard that Victoria Nuland, the former US diplomat who played a key role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, has just joined the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED): one of the key players in the NGO-isation of US foreign policy. No wonder Bidzina Ivanishvili, one of the main founders of Georgian Dream, recently described the NGO class as a “pseudo-elite” nurtured by foreigners, and one basically embarrassed by its own country. It’s surely revealing too that Georgian opposition politicians are often interviewed with EU, US and Nato flags in the background.

It’s clear, in short, that the moral panic over Georgia’s “foreign agent” law had little to do with democracy. Rather, as the historian Bryan Gigantino puts it, Western countries fear the rule would strip them of “important leverage” in the country’s domestic and foreign policy. Samantha Power, head of USAID, essentially admitted as much when she said that the law “gravely threatens Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future”.

This is perhaps the most hypocritical aspect of the Western narrative about somewhere like Georgia. Whatever Russia’s “foreign influence” — and it surely exists — the West’s is far greater. More to the point, it’s perfectly natural for a country like Georgia, straddling the border between Europe and Asia, to exploit the ongoing “multipolarisation” of global politics and boost its own autonomy. Given the West’s own tumbling influence, meanwhile, ham-fisted attempts to forcefully disrupt this process will only push Georgians even closer into the arms of Russia and China.

And while Tbilisi’s future remains undecided, this is far from just Georgia’s problem. After all, something similar is now happening in Moldova. There, too, recent elections revealed a deeply divided electorate. No less important is the role of Western and Western-funded NGOs in that country. For example, various deputies of the pro-Western ruling party, and even the current president of Moldova, have previously participated in Soros Foundations programmes. Combined with the potential for similar trouble elsewhere in the post-Soviet sphere, and it’s clear that the Georgian Dream could yet become a nightmare right across the region.