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Georgia’s hope of closer integration with Europe is hanging by a thread. The ruling Georgian Dream party that is steering the South Caucasus republic back towards Russia’s orbit declared victory in weekend elections. Opposition parties and Georgia’s president say the vote was falsified; observers alleged ballot-stuffing, intimidation and fraud. Thousands of Georgians gathered in Tbilisi on Monday to contest the result, a week after an EU referendum in Moldova was almost lost amid a pro-Russian vote-buying operation. Western leaders need to be more robust in condemning irregularities in Georgia. It’s not just the country’s European future that is at stake. So is western credibility.
After coming to power in 2012, Georgian Dream for years rode two horses. The party created by a billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili ostensibly kept open Georgians’ hopes of joining the EU and Nato while gradually capturing state institutions and repairing relations with Russia, the longtime colonial overlord. Since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine prompted the EU to offer Tbilisi a more concrete path to membership, however, the ruling party has taken actions that close off that route. It has clamped down on LGBT+ rights, and passed a “foreign agents” law similar to one used to crush civil society in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Georgia’s course is being shaped by the whims and fears of Ivanishvili. As European integration became more of a reality, some domestic observers suggest the billionaire and his circle balked at how the transparency and “de-oligarchisation” efforts demanded by Brussels might affect their interests. GD’s dark election campaign portrayed the choice for voters not as between Europe and Russia but between a war with Moscow that opposition parties and western officials would supposedly drag the country into, or peace under the ruling party.
The Central Election Commission, whose nominations the ruling party now controls, says Georgian Dream won 54 per cent of votes. But two exit polls on Saturday by independent pollsters whose projections have proved accurate in previous elections put GD support at 42 per cent or less. Georgian Dream has seized on “positive” language from a monitoring mission led by the OSCE’s democracy arm while ignoring its criticisms. Other missions have reported multiple irregularities, and misuse of state and media resources by GD before the election. A local observer mission uniting dozens of non-governmental groups on Monday said it had uncovered “large-scale fraud” across 196 voting precincts.
Monitoring and opposition groups need to present evidence as quickly as possible to support their claims. Western officials may be wary of making more categorical comments until further proof is available. But statements so far, especially from the EU, have been worryingly mealy-mouthed. It took Brussels 20 hours to call on Georgian authorities to “investigate and adjudicate irregularities”. It is highly unfortunate that the first European leader to arrive in Tbilisi after the vote was Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, an ally of Ivanishvili and Georgian Dream, in the latest of a series of unsanctioned foreign policy initiatives by the holder of the EU’s rotating presidency.
The EU and the US should make clear now that they are ready to sanction Ivanishvili’s circle and senior GD officials if abuses of democracy and human rights are confirmed, or protests in Tbilisi are violently snuffed out. Failure to do so would be a betrayal of the hopes of hundreds of thousands of Georgians, especially among the young, for a future as part of the democratic world. It would be seized on, too, by the Kremlin, which is taking advantage of distractions provided by the US presidential election and the war in the Middle East to step up efforts to bring ex-Soviet neighbours back into its sphere.