Georgia at a crossroads: is it heading for dictatorship?
“Not long ago, the nation was completely united and happy,” said Kviris Palitra (Tbilisi). In late March, Georgia’s national football team beat Greece to secure its first-ever place in the European Championships. To many, it seemed like a symbol of a nation that was heading towards EU membership (it was given official candidate status last year). But now Georgia has been plunged back into chaos. On 9 April, the ruling Georgian Dream party reintroduced its controversial “foreign influence” bill, which would require any media organisation or NGO that receives more than 20% of its funding from abroad to register as a foreign agent. It is closely modelled on a Russian law that Vladimir Putin has used to crush independent journalism and stifle dissent. Last year, Georgian Dream tried to pass the law but withdrew it after mass protests. But now the government appears determined to press on once again. Since the law was reintroduced, Georgia has been rocked by protests and violent clashes between police and protesters. Tear gas, water cannon and rubber bullets have been used; there are many reports of police violence. The EU warned that the law will harm Georgia’s ambitions of joining the bloc. “Georgia is at a crossroads,” stated Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU Commission.
Georgia’s foreign influence bill, if passed, will have “devastating consequences for its freedom and democracy”, said Grigol Julukhidze and Mariam Gubievi in New Eastern Europe (Wrocław). Any organisation with funding from abroad, from a charity for the blind to a news website with foreign investors, will be officially dubbed a “foreign agent”. Georgia’s justice ministry will then have the right to demand sensitive data, on pain of hefty fines. This law is designed to crush critical media, to isolate Georgia from the West. Last week, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the “reclusive billionaire” who runs Georgian Dream, “descended from his steel palace above Tbilisi to make a rare public appearance”, said Open Caucasus Media (Tbilisi). In “an unhinged rant filled with conspiracy theories and threats of repression”, he denounced the US, the EU and Nato as a “global party of war”, which he blamed for both the war in Ukraine and Georgia’s own 2008 conflict with Russia. He also raged against Western LGBTQ+ “propaganda”. If this sounds straight from the Putin playbook, Ivanishvili is a close Kremlin ally who made his money in Russia. Ivanishvili (who is not an elected official) threatened retribution against domestic critics and opposition parties. Along this path lies “the death of Georgia’s democracy, and a descent into dictatorship”.
More than 80% of Georgians want to join the EU, said Gabriel Gavin on Politico (Brussels), so why is Georgian Dream doing this? First, because it thinks it can get away with it: the opposition is fractured, and the law sailed through parliament by 83-23 votes last week. Another explanation is that the party is worried about the outcome of parliamentary elections in the autumn, said Anton Filippov in Ukrainska Pravda (Kyiv). This is going to be the first election without first-past-the-post voting, and the government is under pressure from the EU to carry out judicial and electoral reforms. Both will undermine its position, so it wants control over the press. Another popular theory is that Ivanishvili is doing this because Putin told him to. Many in the opposition see it as “a final turn by Tbilisi towards Russia”.
You can bet the Kremlin is watching the protests closely, said Luke Coffey in Foreign Affairs. “The moment it appears that Georgian Dream is losing its grip on power”, it’s likely that Moscow will intervene. Such unrest, in “the Kremlin’s obsessive worldview, would be a ‘colour revolution’ conspiratorially engineered by the West”. It has acted in similar situations in other former Soviet republics: Belarus, Kazakhstan and of course Ukraine. Russia already occupies 20% of Georgian territory. In the most extreme scenario, it could invade “to bring Georgia fully into the Kremlin’s orbit”. If that seems unlikely, so did the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “Nothing can be ruled out.”