Georgia's Political Crisis

Or, Why We Are Doomed

I’m pessimistic about Georgia’s future and I want to outline the reasons why. If you’re not in the mood for bad news, skip this one.

There are internal and external factors that are related but I’m going to start with the internals, then the externals, then my prognosis for ways out of the crisis. Spoiler alert: it’s not good.

Georgian Politics: Opposition? What opposition?

As of yesterday, Georgian Dream has successfully consolidated control of all of the institutions in Georgia’s government - Parliament, the courts, and the Presidency. Outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili left without a fight. The opposition is divided over this, with many members of the former ruling party, the UNM, criticizing the move as capitulation, while other opposition figures praise it as clever and dignified. I am inclined to agree with the former - I think this was a missed opportunity, and will have a detrimental impact on overall morale (in fact, it has clearly already had a detrimental impact, with many Georgians feeling demoralized and the disparate opposition groups starting to snipe at each other). On the other hand, there’s an old chess adage about not trading your queen when you’re down, and if Salome goes to jail then the opposition has lost their most valuable piece and probably hasn’t gained much in return, so maybe the alternative really would have been worse.

But I want to dwell a bit on what that alternative might have looked like because it also explains why the opposition has a structural disadvantage. If the opposition forces a conflict with the regime, there’s the potential for bloodshed. Georgians absolutely do not want a violent revolution. They don’t want their people to get hurt, and they also don’t want Putin to use it as a pretext for invasion and further land grabs. Unfortunately, when one side of a conflict is willing to resort to violence, as Georgian Dream has, and the other side is not, the nonviolent side has a structural disadvantage, at least in the short term. In the long term, the violent side loses legitimacy and may collapse, although this can take years or even decades to occur, and is often accompanied by horrendous levels of oppression and brutality.

If the opposition isn’t willing to risk direct confrontation, what are they willing to do? We know they’re willing to protest, and we’ve seen many creative protests including a dance protest, a protest divided up by profession, a protest in which people link arms, a protest in which people kick footballs around, a protest in which people wave red cards, a protest in which people display their diplomas… a veritable county fair of protests.

But that’s about it. Opposition representatives were warned, repeatedly and publicly, that GD was about to steal the election, and they buried their collective heads in the sand. Then GD stole the election, and they spent three weeks promising us plans that somehow never materialized (never mind that planning for something that happened three weeks ago is already too late) before appearing to give up and go home. Then Kobakhidze made an unforced error and announced that Georgia would delay EU accession talks until 2028, and the protests started again, but the opposition continued to squander the popular outrage by producing zero new ideas or theories of change, and now here we are with GD winning their last symbolic victory and the opposition once again caught off guard by events because Salome characteristically did not inform people in advance of her plans or intentions because the opposition has no concept of what a plan even is.

So while the opposition has done nothing but stand around for six months vainly hoping someone would take charge, Georgian Dream has consolidated its power and developed its tactics to terrorize and demoralize their opponents. They are using state violence in the form of arrests and beatings by police, coupled with state-sanctioned violence in the form of “titushkies”, or masked goon squads who beat and threaten opposition figures, to scare people away from protests. Every time it looks like the people are getting too outraged, they dial the violence back, and every time it looks like they’re getting too comfortable, they dial it back up. Meanwhile the opposition shares pictures and videos of beaten faces and crying mothers to try to elicit sympathy and outrage but of course this also helps to scare people, and thus far the opposition hasn’t come up with any tactics to counter either official or unofficial violence from the regime.

Some Georgian businesses are putting pressure on the regime by withholding services to the regime and/or donating money, goods, and services to the protesters. This is generally a good sign because these businesses will fear retaliation should GD ultimately win, and having corporations on your side is generally good for a movement. However, Ivanishvili is so independently wealthy that he and his cronies can probably stick it out anyway, and it’s not unheard of in Georgia for the government to just seize a bunch of assets from a business they don’t like, and so these businesses may simply end up as fodder to be sacrificed to GD and their allies to keep them happy and buffer them against the negative economic consequences of their actions.

And that connects to the external factors - sanctions being one of them - but I just want to sum up the internals, because they are overwhelmingly terrible. You have an opposition that lacks unity, leadership, the ability to plan for the future, the ability to respond to GD’s tactics, and the willingness to escalate to direct confrontation should their demands not be met. It’s actually shocking how badly they are losing given how many people in Georgia agree with their cause. The inefficacy of the opposition has made me question my long-held skepticism about the impact of individuals on political systems - as in, if there was a single person in the opposition with an iota of leadership talent, Georgian Dream would have been gone in July. It also makes me wonder what role opposition inadequacy played in the rise of other dictatorial regimes, such as Orban’s and Erdogan’s. I cannot stress enough how badly the opposition here has fumbled the ball, over and over again, every day, for the last several years.

The Global Context: Sanctions, Schmanctions

I am neither prophet nor oracle. I have been wrong in the past. I would be happy to be wrong about sanctions. In fact, if sanctions succeed and Georgian Dream leaves without further ado, I will celebrate. I will run through the streets yelling “I was wrong! I was wrong! Thank the heavens, I was wrong!” I will publish an article about the “Georgian Miracle”, in which sanctions worked quickly and effectively in Georgia, in a way they never have before in a single other country in all of world history.

Now, this is not to say sanctions never contribute to regime change. According to this comprehensive survey, sanctions aimed at regime change and/or democratization have a 31% success rate, with an average sanctions duration of 5.4 years in case of success, and 8 years in case of failure. So what we should expect here is for sanctions to last an average of 7.2 years and ultimately not work. In cases where sanctions were in place for the shortest periods, they still lasted for over a year, and only ended when the regimes massacred people and were subsequently forced out, such as in Thailand in 1992 (over 100 dead) or Malawi in 1993 (38 dead). Despite the death toll, these sanctions are considered amongst the most successful examples of sanctions leading to regime change.

The comparison we hear about most is Belarus; you may have seen a warning about the “Belarusification” of Georgia after the recent elections. Well, Belarus was sanctioned in October 2020, and they responded by serving as a staging area for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Safe to say that those sanctions haven’t quite worked. The countries are similarly situated in the world economy, being on the periphery of Europe and Russia - if anything, Belarus’ geography is more favorable to trade with Europe than Georgia’s. Western sanctions are more effective if they can isolate countries, but the EU and US can’t really isolate Georgia from trade with Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, and the various countries in Russia’s orbit, like Hungary and Belarus itself. Georgia’s already been accused of helping Russia evade sanctions, and now Russia is positioned to do the same for Georgia. Georgian Dream has already awarded numerous valuable state contracts to China and Chinese companies, and the more isolated they become from the West, the more likely they are to rely on contacts with the East.

In fact this is a small part of a growing global problem, which is that all the various countries that the US considers enemies, rivals, or targets of sanctions are starting to form their own trading connections that circumvent the need for interaction with the US and EU. Georgian Dream has promised that US-Georgia relations will reset once Trump is in office, but frankly, the disposition of Georgia is not on Trump’s radar; rather, he is gearing up for a trade war with China and has promised us a series of economy-crushing, inflation-inducing tariffs in pursuance of that war. As the US seeks to isolate itself from foreign trade and China deepens its economic ties with other countries, including Georgia, I think we can expect Georgian Dream to simply change gears from a primarily Western-looking economy to a primarily Northern- and Eastern-looking economy.

Furthermore, autocratic regimes often respond to sanctions by passing the pain on to rivals and to the general public. Georgian Dream has already implemented a set of policies allowing them to enrich themselves while diminishing the resources available to their political enemies - in fact, that set of policies is exactly what brought this political crisis about in the first place. They were widely criticized as a transparent effort to allow the regime to curtail legitimate opposition and consolidate resources. The regime will no doubt use the offshore law to evade sanctions, exactly as it was intended to do, while using the “foreign agents” law to silence internal attempts to curtail corruption. This will allow Ivanishvili and his cronies a measure of insulation against Western sanctions while depleting the resources of the opposition and the people. They had the infrastructure in place, almost as if they’d had this all planned from the beginning.

The result of this will likely be economic pain for Georgian citizens. We’ll probably see rising prices for goods, services, and foreign currencies. We might see a drop in remittances, depending on the extent of the sanctions and whether visa-free travel is targeted. We’ll probably see some Georgian businesses punished for their participation in protests. Probably an increase in elite corruption resulting in a loss of investment in business as it becomes riskier to have a business without the approval of the regime. A decrease in foreign aid and foreign direct investment. Infrastructure degradation. A further worsening of the human rights situation. And, of course, on top of all that, we’ll see an increase in brain drain, as the most capable and successful residents of Georgia do their best to move somewhere else.

The Social Media Illusion

Meanwhile, the sympathies of the Western world are largely with the Georgian people, but those sympathies essentially mean nothing. I see a lot of efforts to win over foreign leaders and foreign tweeters, and a lot of NAFO/Ukraine/Georgia solidarity, but all this sympathy is more of an escape for Western-looking Georgians than it is an actual support network. It’s a way for young Georgians to feel like they’re part of Europe, even as they fail to or refuse to take actual concrete steps towards that outcome. I also get frustrated when I see people who are justifiably skeptical of US interference abroad dismiss Georgia’s opposition as somehow inorganic or representative of US imperial interests. However, I shouldn’t - their opinion doesn’t affect the outcome any more than mine does, which is to say, not at all. The nature of social media is that it feels really high stakes and important, but unless you’re actually using it to organize something like the Arab Spring, it’s actually neither. It’s just a hobby we all have, and our hobby isn’t going to overthrow an autocratic regime. We want to participate, but most of us have as much influence over the outcome as we do when we’re watching sports on TV.

Which is to say, if you’re getting your “vibes” from social media, you probably need a reality check. If you read the English-language posts about Georgia you get the impression that victory is just around the corner. Self-congratulatory posts from opposition leaders are met with tens or hundreds of comments of support, while those of us who used to ask what their plan was to actually win have stopped bothering to ask because it’s become abundantly clear that no answer is forthcoming. One guy was curating a bluesky list of commentators and refused to include me because I had the gall to point out the very obvious fact that the regime was winning. Well, that was a month ago, and now the regime has the third and final branch of government, which they won without even a fight, but somehow that guy still thinks his side has the advantage. But that’s social media for you.

The Rocky Road to Europe

The way I see it, there are a few pathways out of this crisis that lead to a European future for Georgia.

One is if a new leader emerges that can lead the opposition to become effective. Perhaps the sanctions scare business leaders enough that one or more of them step up and begin organizing an effective resistance movement - after all, many of them have foreign education and experience with organizing large groups of people. Perhaps some very successful Georgian living abroad decides to come back and fight for their country. It is often elites who end up leading revolutionary movements, because they have the education, connections, and spare time. This is by its nature an unpredictable outcome - I have no idea how to rate the probability that it will happen, although the fact that it hasn’t happened yet suggests there just isn’t anyone who fits the bill. Georgia’s population is very small, after all.

Another is if elite defections threaten Ivanishvili’s grasp on power. This is the theory behind economic sanctions on Ivanishvili and his cronies. I don’t rate this as likely. As I said, even though sanctions might hurt his cronies, he has the wealth, power, and connections to make sure they’re still much wealthier and more powerful than everyone else in Georgia, which will probably keep them happy. In any case, even if sanctions do eventually work, history suggests it will take years of suffering before that happens.

Another pathway is if Georgian Dream holds elections on schedule in 2028 and loses so badly that they can’t falsify the results. Perhaps four years of police brutality, economic hardship, and obvious governmental corruption and incompetence will finally galvanize the population to pay attention to what’s actually going on here, and perhaps in that time the opposition will figure out some way to counter some of Georgian Dream’s election-rigging tactics. I’d give this one a low probability as well - Georgian Dream will probably use its power to go after independent media, while blaming the sanctions and resulting hardship on the opposition, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they actually do better in 2028. Of course, it’s very hard to predict election outcomes four years in advance, and either way, if this is the pathway out of the crisis, we’re stuck with GD for four more years.

Another pathway is if Russia is somehow defeated on the world stage, or undergoes its own regime change. If Georgian Dream loses their support from Moscow it might shake their hold on power. Then again, it might not. In any case, not very likely.

The most likely way Georgian Dream goes down, in my opinion, is if they make another serious unforced error like they did when Kobakhidze announced they would delay EU talks. It would have to be something even more critical to Georgia’s identity than their belief that they belong in Europe. Perhaps something like acknowledging independence for Abkhazia and South Ossetia, or normalizing relations with them somehow. Or maybe if they kill some protesters, especially if they’re young protesters. That might just infuriate the public enough to shake them out of their complacency and get them to actually overthrow the regime. The more disruptive the protesters become, the more likely we are to see this outcome, and we’ll probably know in a few days if the protests start to die down because of Zourabichvili’s departure and the holiday season’s arrival or if they can maintain momentum. I’d give this outcome - Georgian Dream cracks down too hard and the protesters respond with actual resistance, sometime in the next year or so - maybe a 20% chance of happening, but if the protesters are still there in these numbers by January 15th, I’d upgrade that to maybe 50%.

Of course, as discussed earlier, any overthrow of the regime might serve as a pretext for Russia to invade, which would also put a stop to EU accession. It may be that Georgia is simply doomed by geography to be in Russia’s sphere rather than Europe’s for the forseeable future. Perhaps the opposition knows that, on some level, which is why they seem to be more afraid of success than of failure. Perhaps what they are demanding - for everyone to just do the right thing, because it is right - is a pipe dream.

On the other hand, with Russia mired in Ukraine, maybe Putin doesn’t want a second front any more than Georgians want to be invaded. Maybe if Georgians could find the courage to stand up and take what they say they want and deserve, no one would be able to stop them.

But we’ll probably never know. The most likely outcome I’m seeing here is that Georgian Dream maintains power for the foreseeable future, absent some major shakeup in world politics. Maybe when Ivanishvili is too old to care he’ll give up his grip on power and retire in Moscow, and our grandchildren can take another stab at democracy - assuming they haven’t all emigrated.