Understanding Georgia’s current political situation

Georgia has been facing a political crisis for more than three months, which reached its peak on February 17. A Tbilisi city court sentenced Nika Melia, the chairman of the United National Movement (UNM), the country’s main opposition party, to prison

That was followed a day later with an announcement by Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia that he would resign, effective immediately. Gakharia said he made the decision based on a disagreement with his own party on the jailing of Melia. Gakharia said he hoped that his resignation would help deal with the country’s current tension and political polarization.

Only hours after Gakharia’s announcement, the ruling Georgian Dream party appointed former prime minister, Irakli Garibashvili, as Gakharia’s replacement. 

The court’s decision to jail Melia significantly deepens the ongoing political crisis in Georgia, which first erupted on October 31, 2020, following disputes over the results of parliamentary elections. More than two dozen widely respected local civil society organizations called last autumn’s parliamentary elections “the least democratic and free among the elections held under the Georgian Dream government”.

As was expected, all of the opposition parties rejected the results and demanded that fully transparent elections be held again. In an attempt to put pressure on the incumbent party, the opposition chose the strategy of boycotting the seating of the new parliament. They believed that, in the eyes of the international community, this would help emphasize the Georgian Dream’s undemocratic rule and the fact that political institutions in Georgia have ceased to exist.

Officially, the court is holding Melia in pretrial detention after he and his supporters refused to post a $12,000 bail. This was the increased amount of bail when the prosecution charged Melia with fomenting mass violence during a protest rally after the Georgian Dream decided to controversially invite a Russian lawmaker to Georgia’s parliament in 2019.

While the opposition claims that there is no independent judiciary in Georgia, Gakharia’s statement about “a disagreement with his team over the Melia case” shows that the Georgian Dream wields significant influence over, and is willing to openly discuss certain politically motivated cases, in what is supposed to be an independent judiciary system.

Undoubtedly, the Melia case does not give the ruling party a moral advantage in this political crisis. However, the Georgian Dream’s decision to back the 38-year-old Garibashvili as the new prime minister – a position which Garibashvili already held from November 2013 to December 2015, which made him the youngest head of government along with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – indicates that the Georgian Dream is not interested in reducing the political tension in the country and are still relying on the legitimacy of the election results of 2012, in which they defeated the UNM.

In the run-up to the 2012 election, Georgia’s sole oligarch – billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili – emerged on the political scene and founded the Georgian Dream. Ivanishvili’s image as a philanthropist was seen by many average Georgian voters as a legitimate political alternative to the UNM, who were the then-incumbents and had been in power since the 2003 Rose Revolution. Ivanishvili promised social justice and the protection of human rights, both of which had been deeply eroded in the latter years of the UNM’s rule. 

In the near-decade that has passed, however, the political landscape of Georgia has not significantly changed due to the complacency of the Georgian Dream. According to the election results after 2012, the UNM remains the only legitimate opposition party that can challenge the Georgian Dream and Ivanishvili at the polls.

The steady support that the UNM has received in every election since 2012 indicates that the party continues to have electoral support, generally at the voters’ expense, mainly from the UNM’s strong party identification, which stems from the positive changes that the UNM brought to the country from 2004 to 2006, the first two years that the party and its leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, were in power.

Since being defeated by the Georgian Dream nine years ago, that support, however, the UNM has never been able to capture enough votes or widespread public back to catapult the party back into power. The main reason why the UNM has relatively low popular support can be traced back to cases where it was accused of abuse of power while it was still in office.

The UNM, particularly during the second of its time as the ruling party, was regularly accused of and tied to human and property rights violations, mass incarcerations, crackdowns on protestors and opposition groups, and widespread illegal surveillance. These major transgressions significantly neutralized the significant social and economic reforms of the UNM’s early years, many of which can still be felt in present-day Georgia. However, the authoritarian and lawless behavior of the UNM’s leader in recent years, the increasingly erratic Saakashvili, makes the party’s future less credible for voters when it comes to a de-facto implementation of a balance of power and general democratic rule.

One of the other main opposition parties, European Georgia, represents a splinter group that broke away from the UNM in 2016. European Georgia chose to emphasize its key differences with the UNM, but still carries the stigma for the majority of Georgians of having been a part of the UNM for a dozen years from 2004 to 2016.

Political parties that have recently emerged have all shared the fate of the more established parties in regards to credibility. The founder of the liberal Lelo party, Mamuka Khazaradze, is the co-founder of Georgia’s TBC Bank. He is strongly affiliated with the country’s strict banking policy and the confiscation of property for creditors because of unpaid debts. The right-wing libertarian positions of the party known as Girchi are unacceptable in most cases and, generally, do not represent the wishes of the majority of the population.

As it stands now, the opposition apparently has a limited number of loyal voters to enough headway in any of the country’s elections. Furthermore, the opposition’s last attempt to organize a mass protest rally immediately after the elections in November mostly fell flat. 

According to the most cynical political traditions in Georgia’s political history, the Georgian Dream completely squandered the political capital that they earned when the public gave them a massive mandate in 2012. The voters who helped the Georgian Dream sweep to power a decade after the Rose Revolution never received the social justice they were promised. Instead, they were forced to live through an unfocused economic program, clannish rule in the judiciary system, rampant nepotism in the civil service, decreased direct foreign investments, a devaluation of the national currency, and clear signs of state capture. Furthermore, there are no signs that the ruling party has any plan to overcome the poverty and hopeless situation in Georgia. 

The Georgian Dream’s complacency is still built upon the idea that their institutionalized bad governance is still far superior to the “even worse opposition”. They do not, however, ever consider that the supreme and dominant figure of their party, Ivanishvili, officially announced he was quitting politics back in January. And Gakharia, who managed to create a positive image of Ivanishvili and for himself after the 2019 unrest involving the Russian parliamentarian, is now the former prime minister after having stepped down in mid-February. 

Garibashvili, who returns now returns as prime minister after serving as a defense minister, is one of the last people capable of holding negotiation with the opposition to de-escalate the current political crisis considering his openly virulent hatred of the UNM leader who can lead the negotiation’ process. Garibashvili has, in the past, been linked to the smear campaigns that the Georgian Dream has used against the opposition since 2012, including cases where incriminating information about non-Georgian Dream candidates was leaked in the days leading up to the last vote. The move was meant to foment a deeper sense of fear amongst voters about what the future might hold if a non-Georgian Dream party were to return to power.

The Georgian Dream continues to show a deep reluctance to turn the temperature down in the current political crisis. This limits the opportunities to improve the country’s flagging democracy. So long as strong disagreements and a lack of commitment between the ruling party and the opposition continue to exist, a widening polarization will undermine any chance to continue to build a democratic Georgia.