By Ragnar Weilandt, Post-doctoral fellow, REDEMOS, NTNU, Trondheim
A lot will be at stake when Georgians go to the polls on 26 October. President Salome Zurabishvili has characterized the upcoming parliamentary elections as an “existential” vote that will “determine the country’s destiny for many years to come.” A victory of the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party could mark the end of the country’s already heavily damaged democracy, further align it with Putin’s Russia and reverse its path towards European and Western institutions.
Major protests against the government over the reintroduction and adoption of a Russian-style “foreign agent law” earlier this year painted a picture of an enthusiastically pro-European population. But less than two months before the election, it is far from certain that GD and Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire businessman who has been running the party and the country from behind the scenes, will be removed from power.
Foul play on election day is widely expected. Key questions are how the population would react to obvious fraud, and how GD would react to major protests. However, a further question is whether GD will actually need to rig the vote at all.
An opposition victory would be far from guaranteed even in a clean election. GD maintains that it will lead Georgia into the European Union and frames an opposition victory as the first step towards war with Russia. Significant parts of the population continue to partly or wholly buy such narratives – despite Georgia’s recent loss of its EU candidate status and GD politicians’ increasingly unhinged conspirational rhetoric of a “global war party”, comprising the Georgian opposition and ominous Western actors. In that context, it helps that Ivanishvili and GD exert control over major parts of the media.
But if GD still has a surprisingly good shot at winning, this is also due to the state of the opposition. Ivanishvili and his party might be unpopular in large parts of the population. But so are their opponents.
According to the 2024 Caucasus Barometer, only 12 per cent of Georgians “rather trusts” or “fully trusts” political parties – contrasting with the far more substantial trust they place in the army (76 per cent), religious institutions (73 per cent) or the police (55 per cent). The same survey found that 21 per cent felt most closely aligned with GD. That is not a lot. But with 19 per cent, even less felt most closely aligned to the opposition. Meanwhile 31 per cent did not feel close to any party and the remaining 29 per cent stated that they did not know or refused to answer.
Over the past decade, Georgia’s opposition has been dominated by the United National Movement (UNM), whose association with former president Mikheil Saakashvili makes it highly toxic for a large part of the Georgian electorate. Beyond that, there are a number of smaller parties, often centred around individual personalities and lacking both institutional structures and financial means. Several were created by former UNM politicians, a fact that GD regularly uses to discredit the entire opposition – and often also civil society and President Zurabishvili – as “collective National Movement.”
Such efforts to lump the opposition together are facilitated by the fact that most voters do not view Georgian parties as significantly different from each other. Beyond their pro-Western orientation, few opposition parties have a clear ideology. Even fewer have consistent policy platforms that show voters what they stand for. As Kornely Kakachia from the Georgian Institute of Politics quips, “if you ask political leaders which part of Georgian society they represent, they cannot tell you, they will say ‘we serve the Georgian people.’”
Other than UNM and GD, no Georgian party managed to build nationwide support and to attract more than a few percent of the vote. With a 5 per cent threshold in the elections, many votes risk being lost in this fragmented party landscape.
To avoid this, several opposition parties have formed three electoral coalitions over the past few months. Some other parties are still debating whether to team up and, if so, with whom. But just as their component parties, these blocks lack coherent messaging on what they actually stand for. As Georgians face a number of socio-economic challenges, being pro-Western and pro-EU might not be enough for the opposition to win. Especially against an incumbent party that can alleviate some of these challenges by using government coffers to buy off voters ahead of the elections.
Georgia is not unique in having underdeveloped parties. The lack of competitive party systems continues to be a major challenge for democratization in Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and beyond. But right now, Georgia stands out by how much is at stake. Georgia’s strong civil society has regularly stepped in to take over responsibilities that opposition parties were unable to fulfill. But following the adoption of the foreign agent law and GD’s announcement to ban what it calls the “collective National Movement” after the elections, the survival of any form of political opposition is now in question.
Photo credits: “what connects us all” by shioshvili is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
