The USA, (Brussels Morning Newspaper) The war in Ukraine has, appropriately, dominated news coverage of the former Soviet states so much that Georgia has been all but forgotten by the western media. However, it was back in the news this week and for all the wrong reasons. Since gaining its independence from the USSR back in 1991, Georgia has experienced a political cycle of democratic breakthrough, authoritarian consolidation, and regime collapse. Usually, it only takes about eight years for a dominant political party, first the Citizens United of Georgia under the leadership of former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, then the United National Movement (UNM) led by Mikheil Saakashvili, to go from breakthrough to collapse.
The current ruling coalition, the Georgian Dream (GD) led by a reclusive billionaire named Bidzina Ivanishvili who holds no official position but is still broadly understood to be Georgia’s most powerful political figure, has been in power for just over ten years, but in recent days we saw signs that the GD too might be heading for regime collapse.
In Georgia this week thousands of citizens are protesting the proposed foreign agent law. This law is modeled not, as the government claims, on the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) in the US, but on laws seeking to defang civil society organization that are already on the books in Russia and similarly repressive states. The Georgian parliament passed the law Tuesday, but Georgia’s President Salome Zurabishvili has promised to veto it. However, all that is needed to override that veto is simple majority of votes in Parliament, so the veto is mostly symbolic.
The foreign agent law would compel any civil society or media organization that gets at least 20% of its funding from foreign sources to register as “agents of foreign influence” and, according to Human Rights Watch “impose additional onerous reporting requirements, inspections, and administrative and criminal liability, including up to five years in prison for violations.”
The gravity of this bill is difficult to overstate. In countries like Georgia that are dominated by one political force, even an elected political force, civil society acts as the primary watchdog and check on political power. No opposition party has enough support to perform that role. The judiciary is insufficiently independent; and there are no regions or major cities led by other parties. Moreover, for years many of Georgia’s most impactful and respected civil society organizations have relied substantially on foreign funding, primarily from the US and Europe. The foreign agent law would move Georgia away from democracy and towards a form of electoral authoritarianism.
But the Georgian people aren’t having it.
After weeks of opposition to the bill, there were very large demonstrations on Tuesday as Georgians came out to protest against what they understood to be a move by their government away from the west and towards Moscow. The government responded with tear gas and water cannons as the conflict escalated as some demonstrators tried to enter the parliament. Georgia has a long history of street demonstrations. Protestors calling for the government to resign have been more of a constant than a variable over the last 25 years or so. Once, during the Rose Revolution in fall of 2003, they even succeeded in forcing the president to resign.
Accordingly, it is tempting to see these demonstrations as similarly fruitless, but it is not quite that simple.
The Georgian dream has now been in power for over a decade. They have long since run out of ideas for governing or for addressing the myriad problems facing Georgia. Their rationale for strategy in power has, in recent years seemed to be a combination of scaring voters about the possibility of the UNM returning to power and leaving most people alone most of the time.
That worked for a while, particularly because the UNM was always front and center in the protest movements and demonstrations. Ultimately, for much of the last decade, the grip that the Georgian Dream had on power also came from a combination of limiting democratic space, and the strong distain that the Georgian people continue to hold for the UNM and former president Mikheil Saakashvili. This gave the Georgian Dream something like an immunity to the kinds of widespread demonstrations that had brought down the two previous Georgian governments.
This approach might have continued to work, but Russia’s war on Ukraine changed Georgian politics as well. That war heightened the anger among many Georgian people towards Russia, not least because many Georgians can easily recall Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. The Georgian government’s lackluster response to the war and unwillingness to fully embrace this cause and the sanctions regime led by the United States has to further disillusionment with the government among the Georgian people. This has also contributed to the greater resonance of the longstanding accusation leveled against the GD and Ivanishvili that they were closely tied to Russia. The foreign agent law only exacerbates that perception.
While the foreign agent law will weaken Georgia’s democracy, it will also create a crisis for the GD. The government will no longer be able to plausibly assert they are interested in democracy. Similarly, the government will have a much more difficult time claiming they want to be aligned with the US and Europe. This will inevitably set Georgia’s NATO and EU aspirations even further back. The government, driven overwhelmingly by their desire to remain in power will have little choice but to become even more illiberal, which in turn will lead to either an ugly repressive regime or greater domestic instability.
The current moment may be the biggest threat to the Georgian Dream since the initiative came to power in late 2012. The demonstrations on the streets of Tbilisi and other Georgian cities have been precipitated by the foreign agent law but they reflect a much larger disgruntlement with the Georgian Dream government. Unlike in the past, the Georgian Dream cannot link these demonstrations to the UNM because the UNM has been unable, and perhaps even savvy enough to be unwilling, to make these demonstrations about them.
This means that the Georgian Dream cannot place the current uprising in the frame of Georgia’s co-dependent two party competition. There only strategy is to either hope that this all blows over or crackdown more. The former is unlikely although certainly possible. The latter is at least as likely to cause a reaction that topples the regime as it is to succeed. Making predictions about Georgia’s politics is usually a mug’s game, but it is hard to see how the GD makes it through this crisis.
