Georgia set to inaugurate disputed president amid political crisis
By AFP
December 28, 2024
Mikheil Kavelashvili's inauguration is expected to further escalate the political crisis which has seen mass pro-EU demonstrations - Copyright AFP Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE
Irakli METREVELI
Georgia is set to inaugurate on Sunday a ruling party loyalist as president, after his election was declared “illegitimate” by the outgoing leader and the pro-Western opposition.
Former footballer Mikheil Kavelashvili’s inauguration is expected to further escalate the political crisis which has seen mass pro-EU demonstrations.
The Black Sea nation has been in turmoil since October’s disputed parliamentary elections and the government’s decision to shelve European Union accession talks.
Thousands have taken to the streets daily for a month, accusing the increasingly repressive government of derailing Tbilisi’s European Union bid, with a fresh rally planned outside parliament during Kavelashvili’s inauguration.
For the first time in Georgia’s history, the swearing-in ceremony will be held behind closed doors in the parliamentary chamber.
On December 14, an electoral college controlled by the ruling Georgian Dream party installed the far-right ex-Manchester City striker as the country’s next figurehead leader.
But outgoing President Salome Zurabishvili, whose mandate ends with the new leader’s inauguration, has vowed to not step down until the government announces fresh parliamentary elections.
Opposition parties have refused to enter the newly elected parliament, while Zurabishvili has declared the legislature, the government and president-elect “illegitimate”.
Addressing tens of thousands of protesters last Sunday, she said that a re-run of the “illegitimate” election would be the “formula to resolve such a crisis”.
– ‘Many years of imprisonment’ –
Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s announcement on November 28 that Tbilisi would not seek the opening of EU accession talks until 2028 triggered a month of daily mass protests which are still ongoing.
It remains unclear how Georgian Dream would react if Zurabishvili refuses to leave the presidential palace.
She is hugely popular among protesters who see her as a beacon of Georgia’s European aspirations.
Many have vowed to defend her against any attempted eviction from office.
Kobakhidze said Zurabishvili’s failure to vacate the Orbeliani Palace “would constitute a criminal offence punishable by many years of imprisonment”.
Mirroring language reminiscent of that used by the Kremlin about its political opponents, Kobakhidze has described protesters as “violent groups” controlled by a “liberal fascist” opposition and ruled out calling fresh elections.
In the first 10 days of protests, riot police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse demonstrators — some of whom threw fireworks and stones.
The interior ministry reported more than 400 arrests, while the country’s top human rights official, ombudsman Levan Ioseliani and Amnesty International have accused security forces of “torturing” those detained.
– Pro-Russian tilt –
The reported police brutality has drawn growing international condemnation, with Washington and several European countries imposing visa bans on Georgian Dream officials.
On Friday, the United States imposed sanctions on Georgia’s former prime minister and the honorary chairman of Georgian Dream, Bidzina Ivanishvili, saying he undermined the country’s democratic future for Russia’s benefit.
Oligarch Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man, is widely regarded as the de facto leader of Georgia, despite holding no official position.
Last week, the United States and Britain slapped sanctions on Georgia’s interior minister and other senior officials over a clampdown on pro-Western demonstrators.
Constitutional law experts — including one author of Georgia’s constitution, Vakhtang Khmaladze — have also said the new parliament, government and president-elect are “illegitimate”.
That is because a court ruling on Zurabishvili’s bid to get parliamentary poll results annulled was still pending at the time the chamber convened. The court eventually ruled the case inadmissible.
Tensions have ratcheted higher in Georgia since 2022, driven by the ruling party’s shift from its initially liberal, pro-Western agenda to what critics have denounced as an ultra-conservative pro-Russian tilt.
That has led Brussels to freeze Georgia’s EU accession process.
Thousands in Georgia human chain as pro-EU protests enter 2nd month
By AFPDecember 28, 2024
Mass street protests gripped Georgia since November 28 - Copyright AFP/File Giorgi ARJEVANIDZE
Thousands of Georgians formed a human chain in central Tbilisi on Saturday, in support of the country’s European Union membership, marking second month of their daily pro-Europe rallies.
Mass street protests gripped Georgia since November 28, when the ruling Georgian Dream party’s increasingly authoritarian government said it will not seek the opening of EU accession talks until 2028.
The protest came a day before a controversial inauguration of Georgian Dream loyalist Mikheil Kavelashvili as the county’s new president, after his election was declared “illegitimate” by the current leader Salome Zurabishvili and the pro-Western opposition.
On Saturday afternoon, thousands of demonstrators, waving Georgian and EU flags, lined the Mtkvari River embankment and several bridges in the capital, Tbilisi, forming a kilometres-long human chain, and AFP reporter saw.
“I Want to Hold Your Hand,” a hit song by the English rock band the Beatles, echoed from speakers mounted on a car as it drove along the human chain.
Zurabishvili — at loggerheads with the ruling party -– has joined the demonstrators at Tbilisi’s Dry Bridge.
Similar rallies were held in cities across Georgia, local media reported.
On the Metekhi Bridge in the historic district of the city, protesters displayed a banner reading “Freedom for political prisoners.”
In the first 10 days of protests, riot police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse demonstrators — some of whom threw fireworks and stones.
The interior ministry reported more than 400 arrests, while the country’s top human rights official, ombudsman Levan Ioseliani and Amnesty International have accused security forces of “torturing” those detained.
The reported police brutality has drawn growing international condemnation, with Washington and several European countries imposing visa bans on Georgian Dream officials.
On Friday, the United States imposed sanctions on Georgia’s former prime minister and the honorary chairman of Georgian Dream, Bidzina Ivanishvili, saying he undermined the country’s democratic future for Russia’s benefit.
Oligarch Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man, is widely regarded as the de facto leader of Georgia, despite holding no official position.
The EU-candidate Black Sea nation’s government faces accusations of an authoritarian, pro-Russian shift that has undermined Georgia’s EU bid, a goal enshrined in the constitution and supported by 80 percent of the population.
Uprising for democracy in the Caucasus: The Georgian people versus the government
First jointly published by Posle Media and Tempest.
The country of Georgia, a small nation of 3.8 million people in the Caucasus, has been thrown into a profound crisis. Its people have risen up against the ruling party, Georgian Dream, over the passage of its Russa-style “foreign influence law,” homophobic anti-LGBTQ propaganda law, rigging of the recent election, and suspension of accession talks for membership in the EU.
The billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili pulls the strings behind Georgian Dream. He is the country’s richest oligarch and possesses a fortune of $6.4 billion, which is nearly the size of the government’s entire budget and a fifth of the country’s GDP. He and his party, whatever their clashes with the West and their tilt toward Russia, collaborate with all the imperialist powers and multinational corporations in the plunder and exploitation of the country’s people, wealth, and resources.
Fed up with such authoritarianism and exploitation, the Georgian people have erupted in mass protest against their government and for democracy and equality. Georgian Dream has responded with utmost brutality, repressing protests and arresting protestors. But the movement shows no signs of backing down and as we publish, the mass protests continue, for the twenty-fourth consecutive day. The country stands on a knife edge.
Ashley Smith and Ilya Budraitskis interview Georgian activists and scholars Ia Eradze, Luka Nakhutsrishvili, and Lela Rekhviashvili about the roots of the uprising, its trajectory, and Georgia’s place in global capitalism and the imperialist order.
Ilya Budraitskis & Ashley Smith: The people of Georgia have risen up in a new mass protest movement against the Government. The roots of it are, in part, a response to the results of the recent election that brought Georgian Dream back into power. What did they run on? What were the opposition parties and what were their platforms? Were people satisfied by those options? What were the official results? Were the elections rigged?
Luka Nakhutsrishvili: We are in the midst of a mass democratic uprising against the Georgian Dream government. Hundreds of thousands peacefully protest in the main square in Tbilisi and in cities and towns throughout the country. In the past two weeks, we have seen protest marches held across all of Tbilisi at all times. More and more professional groups and neighborhoods have started to self-organize. This is unprecedented in our recent history.
The immediate root of the protests is the profound crisis of legitimacy produced by the ruling party who is following the script that Viktor Orban used in Hungary to turn its government into an authoritarian regime. But Georgian Dream has gone further than Orban-style illiberal democracy by rigging the election and cracking down on protesters in a way that is more reminiscent of Belarus and Russia. The suspension of accession talks with the European Union was only the last drop.
Over the past two years, Georgian Dream has taken a dramatic far-right turn. When it came to power in 2012, it claimed to be social democratic and was part of the socialist bloc in the European Parliament. While many worried it might tilt toward Russia, it remained in support of EU integration and accession to NATO.
But since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it made a complete U-turn to adopt Euroscepticism, embrace right-wing nationalism, advocate reactionary gender politics, propel conspiracy theories into the political mainstream, and express open sympathies with Russia.
Georgian Dream ran on a platform of fear-mongering, deploying the slogan “choose peace, not war” paired with images of a flourishing Georgia on one side and on the other a destroyed Ukraine. Their implication was clear; if you vote for the opposition Georgia will end up invaded and occupied by Russia.
As for Georgian Dream’s base, while it lost a lot of its voters who are sympathetic to EU-integration, it has gained support among far-right nationalist voters, who approve of their anti-LGBT law, oppose Washington’s supposed plan to drag Georgia into a global war, and express hostility to EU bureaucrats they claim are violating Georgian sovereignty. The rest of their voters supported them out of fear of war, which Georgian Dream cynically manipulated.
The four main opposition parties coalesced into coalitions to challenge Georgian Dream in the election. They are parties of the technocratic establishment, most of them affiliated to the previous government, and proved unable to address the grievances of the vast majority. Most voters don’t like them and voted for them tactically to defeat Georgian Dream or at least stop them from winning an outright majority and ruling on their own.
IB & AS: In the end, Georgian Dream did win a majority amidst wide-scale allegations that it had rigged the results. Is that true?
LN: Yes. Polls indicated it would remain the largest party but without enough votes to independently form a government (like Kaczynski’s far-right party after last year’s election in Poland). No one predicted it would win with 54 percent of the vote. To ensure that result, it resorted to every authoritarian trick imaginable, basically turning the vulnerable social condition of most of the population, which it has systematically reproduced, into an instrument of power.
The party organized what we call a voting carousel to help their supporters vote in multiple places to drive up its results. Georgian Dream also bullied people into voting for it with the threat of cutting off people’s access to our minimal social welfare system, including medical care. They intimidated workers in the public sector like schoolteachers with the threat of losing their jobs.
The security forces told people with loved ones in jail that if they did not vote Georgian Dream they would not get fair trials. They took away the ID cards of those whom they knew supported the opposition parties to make it hard for them to vote.
They made it very difficult for the hundreds of thousands of emigres to vote. Why? Because this group had left the country out of frustration with its politicians and poverty and are most inclined to vote for the opposition.
Georgian Dream then overrode the lawsuit that the president had filed to declare the elections unconstitutional because of mass violations of election laws. They didn’t even wait for the decision by the court they control to convene the parliament – something that clearly violates the Constitution. Georgian Dream thus did everything to further exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy engendered by how openly and badly they rigged the election.
IB & AS: The trigger of the uprising is Georgian Dream’s decision to suspend the process for accession to the European Union. Why did it decide to do this, especially given that a majority of Georgians support integration?
Ia Eradze: Georgian Dream likely suspended the accession talks because it faced little protests after it rigged the election. It also does not want to agree to the EU’s conditionalities for democratic reform, which would threaten its hold on power. Finally, Russia no doubt put pressure on it behind the scenes.
Their suspension of talks has transformed the situation and awakened people like me who were shocked by the election results. I felt paralyzed for about two weeks. I couldn’t do anything. There were demonstrations after the elections, organized by opposition parties, but they were not that large.
The small turnout was a result of collective paralysis. It took weeks for people to grasp the enormity of the rigging that gave Georgian Dream such a victory. Frustration began to accumulate under the surface. Georgian Dream’s announcement of the suspension of accession talks, which violates our Constitution, broke the dam of welled-up anger and it has burst forth throughout the country.
In many ways, their announcement is fortunate. I was really afraid that they might pretend to go along with the EU talks, faking agreements, while they instituted authoritarian rule. That would have been far worse. Luckily for us, they overreached and now we are in the midst of a mass movement against the government.
Most people are not protesting just about EU accession. We are out in the streets to stop an authoritarian government from continuing to run roughshod over our Constitution, our rights, and our livelihoods. We are protesting to defend our democracy against Georgian Dream’s transformation of every state institution, from the schools to the courts, into tools to serve its interests and those of the oligarchs who control it.
The government has responded to our uprising with utter brutality. They have started raiding people’s homes to find people they claim are planning a revolution. They’ve arrested some opposition leaders. The regime is becoming more autocratic by the day. Up to 500 people have been arrested and most of them were beaten up; some were tortured (even the public defender judged the treatment of many detainees to be torture). In the last few days, we have seen people being kidnapped from the streets by police. Among the prisoners are professors, university and school students, artists, and doctors.
IB & AS: What are the protests like? What groups and classes of people are involved and why is accession to the EU important to them? Were these the same that protested the special law? What are the protesters’ main demands?
Ia E: They are huge. A large percentage of the country’s 3.8 million people have joined the demonstrations. In Tbilisi, which has a population of about a million people, every day throughout the day and into the night there are at least 100,000 people protesting and on some days over 150,000.
They are much larger than the spring protests against the foreign agent law, and they are not just in Tbilisi. They are taking place throughout the country, not only in major districts, but also in small towns in the countryside.
And they are far more diverse than the spring protests. People of all ages have joined the movement. Young people are out in force, but also everyone else. Different classes of people from professionals to workers are in the demonstrations. It’s really beautiful to behold.
Everyone realizes the danger we face. I’m part of an initiative that organizes actions to defend education. Countless other groups in different sectors of society are doing the same. None of this is very coordinated. It’s like streams of separately organized initiatives converging into massive protests.
When I wake up in the morning, I look at the protest schedule to figure out which one I want to join. One day I ended up at four different protests. They are so numerous because they are all self-organized.
This reality contradicts the government media that tries to portray the protest as a conspiracy, a “Maidan” instigated by foreign powers and their local agents. It’s not. It’s spontaneous and decentralized. If it was so centrally planned, you would go to the rallies and see a platform with organized speakers. Nothing of the sort is happening. In fact, in Tbilisi’s main square where the demonstrations happen, there is no stage, there are no speeches, and the opposition parties are not leading the protests.
There is not even organized chanting during the day. Many of the protests are just silent defiance of the government. The energy, however, is amazing. But the movement is gradually finding its collective voice; it already has articulated two basic demands: new elections and the immediate release of all imprisoned protesters and activists.
LN: In the face of how decentralized the protest is, it is interesting to look at its language. The protestors shoot New Year’s fireworks and put laser shows on the parliament building which has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong with this country. They hold concerts and bang on the metal fences, which the security forces have used to pen in demonstrations and separate them from the parliament.
Later in the night, the protests become intense partisan fights on the streets against the special forces. In a sign of the government’s fear and turn to repression, it has banned fireworks, lasers, and face coverage.
Ia E: I do want to stress that amidst this spontaneity, people are beginning to organize in small initiatives that come together in the demonstrations. In however decentralized fashion, planning is going on, targets are being chosen, and a movement is being organized.
For example, protests have targeted a range of public institutions to challenge their slander against the movement or their indifference to the brutality of the regime. Among these institutions is the Public Broadcaster, the country’s main national theatre, the Ministry of Education, the Writers’ House, the National Cinema Center, the Justice Palace, and the National Center for Educational Quality Enhancement.
In some cases, public servants have joined those demonstrating outside, which was very moving to witness. Public servants have also started signing petitions and organizing marches notwithstanding pressure from a government that aims to erase the line between party loyalty and state institutions.
The opposition parties play next to no role right now in the movement. They have been sidelined despite what the Western media say. People have been telling a joke that these parties should at least do something like provide hot tea at the demonstrations.
LN: The opposition media, however, overrepresents their presence for obvious reasons. They want to boost their profile. So does Georgian Dream’s media propaganda to persuade people that these protests are instigated by the “radical opposition.” But when you’re on the protests, they are actually a negligible force and are doing very little.
Some of these politicians have become so self-conscious of their insignificant role that they are now refusing to be interviewed at the demonstrations. As a result, those now being interviewed are young people, many of them in gas masks, and what they have to say makes a lot more sense than anything you’d hear from the politicians.
IB & AS: These protests seem very similar to the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. Those began among students and then, when they faced brutal repression the movement, spread rapidly to the rest of society turning into a militant mass uprising that toppled the government. With splits in the government including resignations and opposition politicians joining the protests, do you think the Georgian uprising could follow the same trajectory?
Ia E: It is now unimaginable how this crisis can be solved in an institutional, peaceful, and legal manner. Our country is in a full-scale confrontation between the people and the government..
LN: It’s clearly escalating. The government has turned to surveillance, raids, and brutal repression. But no one’s been scared off the streets. The movement is now demanding, not new elections, but that the government itself must go and now. The mass sentiment is it’s either us or them. It’s at a tipping point now, and we’ll see if it escalates to challenge Georgian Dream’s capacity to rule.
As for similarities with the Ukrainian Maidan, ironically, it is Georgian Dream who follows the Maidan script – from canceling EU talks like Yanukovich did to banning masks and mobilizing street thugs. They seem unable to make sense of the current uprising as anything other than an attempt by its internal and external enemies to “Maidanize” Georgia. This obsession with Maidan might be one of the reasons why the government has failed miserably to understand–and to quell–these protests.
Lela Rekhviashvili: Also, Georgian Dream has used and abused Maidan uprising to scare people away from protesting. They’ve said if you challenge the state in that way, Russia will intervene, and we’ll end up invaded, occupied, and at war like Ukraine. They did this throughout the election.
But Georgian Dream in their arrogance and perhaps stupidity have provoked the very mass opposition they had demonized. Their authoritarianism is the main cause of this enormous wave of demonstrations. Now we’re on a knife edge, between an increasingly autocratic government and a mass movement that shows no signs of backing down.
IB & AS: The whole scenario you’re describing sounds like many other uprisings around the world in which the normal functions of government cannot resolve a crisis. Often in such situations, people create alternatives to the government, popular assemblies, that can pose an alternative to the state. Are there signs of all this self-organizing you’re describing coming together to form higher levels of unity and democratic decision making?
LN: Not yet. At this point, people are mobilizing and figuring out novel ways to withstand the tear gas, evade repression, and how to avoid being raided and arrested by the authorities.
Ia E: People are starting to build organization. Several groups and several movements have converged on common projects. The best example is how many forces came together to protest the public broadcast channel for their biased coverage and demand that they live stream the protest and interview participants, ultimately forcing the channel to concede. There are examples, but people have yet to organize popular assemblies to discuss the movement and collectively plan initiatives.
LN: Even those among us who analyze and write are only just beginning to catch up with events over the last month. The whole process has taken us by storm. Since discontent with the rigged elections were unable to produce a sustained protest, we had started preparing for slow resistance organized within smaller communities. But then boom the protests exploded into a full blown movement in confrontation with the government.
IB & AS: Georgia seems trapped between various major imperial powers—the US, EU, Russia and China—because of its role as a transit site for global trade. Explain Georgia’s role in global capitalism. Would Georgia Dream’s suspension of EU accession change its position in global capitalism? Would it become more integrated into Russian capitalism?
LR: Georgia is a typical peripheral country, in which imperial powers have facilitated the creation of a predatory economic system masquerading as development. The EU and the U.S. have significantly shaped the country’s political economy since the early 1990s, contributing to the creation of unsustainable contradictions. On the one hand, they want Georgia to be democratic, but on the other, they and local capitalists, especially the most powerful oligarch, Ivanishvili, want to plunder the country for profit.
Their development program is impossible to implement and sustain a democracy. Why? Because the plunder and impoverishment provoke opposition that challenges the development strategy. To contain that resistance requires repression and with that a turn to authoritarianism.
The energy sector is a good example of this contradiction, especially since Georgia’s becoming an “energy hub” and part of a “green” energy corridor is currently a common goal of the EU and the Georgian government. In the 1990s, but especially since the Rose Revolution of 2003, Western governments, aid agencies (e.g. USAID), and development banks (e.g. World Bank, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) have played a major role in creating state institutions that would facilitate privatization and deregulation of the energy sector.
By 2008, Georgia had privatized all but 2 of its up to 50 Soviet-inherited hydropower plants. While Western institutions supported privatization and the creation of an FDI-dependent economy, it was predominantly Russian capital that actually bought up power plants and energy distribution facilities.
When the opportunities to attract FDI (foreign direct investment) through privatization dried up, the government–again in cooperation with Western actors–began to promote greenfield hydropower plants as part of the EU’s green transition agenda. By 2024, the government had signed contracts for 214 new hydropower plants across the country, even if existing capacities almost cover domestic electricity demand. To attract financial capital, it offered land and water resources at nominal prices and promised that the state would protect investors from a range of financial, regulatory, and political risks.
Given the extractive nature of the new hydropower projects, local popular movements have succeeded in opposing and sometimes canceling or obstructing such projects, especially the large ones such as Namakhvani, Nenskra, Khudoni.
The government got a new impetus to revive all the opposed hydropower plant projects and to propose new ones in 2022, when the EU started creating a ‘green energy corridor’ across Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania, and Hungary, and committed to finance an undersea electricity cable across the Black Sea. European institutions, most notably the European Energy Community, have participated in the planning activities through which the Georgian government declares electricity exports to be key to their development agenda and commitment to building all previously contested large hydropower plants.
Throughout these 15 years since the new hydropower was promoted as a “green transition” agenda and developmental panacea, a range of local capitalists have learned how to benefit from the construction process, some linking new plants to cryptomining, hence creating a strong local lobby for continued expansion of the sector.
Georgian Dream declares anti-hydropower opposition movements to be one of its main enemies. They openly declare that consolidation of power, including the adoption of the Foreign Agents Law, is important to suppress such opposition to Georgia’s economic development.
This is what I mean when I say that the developmental agenda that the Georgian government has elaborated in collaboration with the Western powers and also to the benefit of others, including Russian and Chinese capital ( which is not featuring in energy but is prominent in transport infrastructures), is hard if not impossible to implement democratically. So Georgian Dream, much like its political predecessors, turns towards authoritarianism to be able to better serve the interests of local and international capital.
When we insist that the breakdown of the EU integration is dangerous, this is not because we are unaware of the problematic consequences of the EU integration, or that we are unaware of how right-wing populism is shaking Europe’s core and peripheral economies alike, and how many European countries are trashing their commitment to human rights, international law, the UN, the ICC, and the ICJ in carrying out their joint war, their genocide, in Palestine.
Instead, for us it is crystal clear that the current authoritarian consolidation serves to unroll the same problematic economic development agenda with an even more brutal face, suppressing any possibility of even protesting against it. This means being Europe’s periphery without being protected from the worst effects of this peripherality by the most basic mechanisms of protection of social and political rights.
Now what about Russia and China? We can’t really say much about Russia because all the deals they have done have been behind the scenes, not in public. Did Russia put pressure on Georgia? It’s likely but we don’t have the details on its nature. We can clearly observe, however, that Russian officials express satisfaction with the disintegration of EU-Georgia relations.
China has also been quiet, but its economic interests are clear. It views Georgia as a transit site that enables it access to Europe’s market. Georgia is important especially after Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine cut off China’s northern route to Europe.
One of the alternative routes, the so-called middle corridor of the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative, which passes through Georgia, has now become much more important. The last thing China wants is any kind of instability that would disrupt their trade. It doesn’t care about accession or authoritarianism, just as long as the route remains open.
LN: Lela’s explanation of Georgian Dream is far better than that of the campists, which imply that it is some kind of anti-imperialist party. The reality, however, is much more banal: Georgia is an oligarchic regime, in which Ivanishvili assures elite loyalty by granting benefits to businessmen and politicians of lesser wealth while all relevant state institutions, most importantly the judiciary, are captured to protect their interests. Thus, there is an autonomous, domestic dynamic that reproduces the oligarchic system in Georgia. It is by no means reducible to mere interaction with global or Western capital.
Campists don’t grasp this and end up excusing everything Georgian Dream is doing from passing the foreign agents law to rigging the election and even repressing the current movement. But, contrary to many campists’ reading, the way Georgian Dream is handling the situation is by no means simply a reaction to “Western imperialism,” which would indirectly justify their authoritarian measures as self-defense.
The campists just denounce Europe for its colonial history, its neo-colonial present, and its complicity with genocide as if that’s the end of the matter. While much of this is true, they often present China as an alternative, despite its autocratic nature and its complicity with our exploitation and oppression. That is no alternative.
I think it’s disastrous for the Left to abandon commitments to democracy and parrot Georgian Dream’s authoritarian turn in the name of sovereignty. It is not only wrong, but politically disastrous. Anyone committed to emancipatory politics should reject it.
If the Left adopts it, it will guarantee that it remains isolated and without influence in the biggest movement we’ve seen in generations that is fighting for democracy and equality. It will put the Left on the other side of the movement’s barricades.
LR: This campist Left is parroting the government’s abuse of concepts like sovereignty and decolonial discourse. In doing so, they are aligning themselves with a government that serves our oligarch and international capital that is now violently repressing its own people.
Authoritarian states like Russia to Hungary and China cynically use the West’s terrible record of imperialism and colonialism to justify their own predatory rule. The leftists that go along with this are flirting dangerously with a red/brown alliance like Sara Wagenecht does in Germany.
IB & AS: So given this transit hub situation, how have all these powers that have a stake in Georgia for different reasons, how have they responded to the uprising and the crisis now for them in Georgia, China, Russia, U.S., European Union?
LN: At this point, only the Western powers have condemned the government’s repression and violence. They also did not recognize the election results; whereas China, Turkey, Iran, and Russia congratulated Georgian Dream on its victory. Russia has also stated that if Georgian Dream needs help, they would be willing to send in troops.
Ia E: The EU governments may have condemned Georgian Dream’s brutality, but the Western development banks have not. Why? Because Georgian Dream shows every intention of continuing to pay their loans and sustaining their contracted development projects. The banks seem to be putting their economic interests before democracy. At the same time, it is clear that the Georgian Dream and its supporting economic elites have enormously profited through development projects, funded by these banks. This allows me to emphasize, once again, that the economic development trajectory that Georgia has been following was neither completely forced onto the government by the West, nor inevitable, but rather a conscious and rather profitable choice of the Georgian Dream government to accept the rules of the globally dominant development discourse.
LN: In the worst-case scenario, the EU will abandon putting normative, political pressure on Georgia to democratize and continue doing business with Georgia even under this wretched government like they do with those in Azerbaijan, Serbia, and other Central European and Central Asian countries. Serbia might be a particularly salient case as a country that seems permanently stuck in the accession process. While denouncing Serbia’s authoritarianism, the EU stipulates unpopular contracts regarding the extraction of lithium in the country.
Campists abroad or our local sovereigntists might interpret this as the West finally leaving a sovereign country alone. But in reality, this will be a problem for us, because the normative horizon of democracy, associated with the European framework, is an indispensable tool to put popular pressure on a government that is otherwise bent on crushing democracy altogether. In this sense, the EU, for protesters, is a symbol of the rule of law, civil rights, and equality.
At this point, on a mass level, the striving towards Europe and the language of “defending Georgia’s bright, European future” seems to be the only language available for articulating demands for democracy and social justice. The question then is how the people will rearticulate these in case the European horizon actually collapses. How do we and can we fight for political democracy and economic equality isolated from the norms of democracy and human rights emanating from the “collective West”?
IB & AS: In this dynamic situation, what do you think the Georgian Left, social movements, and unions should be advocating? Is there any possibility of forging a political alternative on the Left to challenge Georgian Dream and the pro-capitalist opposition parties?
Ia E: It’s very hard to say because in the past there have also been attempts and nothing really came out of them. I’m very hopeful now because Georgian Dream’s authoritarian turn has forced people into a kind of political awakening.
We need to start a conversation about building a party. For now, people are beginning to talk about organizing a platform movement that unites some of the self-organized forces together to project common demands. That might start a process.
LN: Meanwhile, more and more people feel the need to unionize in mostly new trade unions that won’t be dominated by Georgian Dream party interests. This comes as an immediate response to two developments: Many have discovered the strike as the most efficient peaceful tool of protest and resistance, but since, in purely legal terms, going on a strike isn’t easy in Georgia, organizing it on the basis of a union appears as the most practical way to give it a try. Even more importantly, a lot of public servants have started looking for ways to unionize as a reaction to the new harsh amendments in the Public Service Law hastily passed by Georgian Dream which will soon make it easier for party-loyal heads in different public institutions to fire or pressure government-critical public servants. All of a sudden, strikes and unions, which would be denigrated as “leftist” or “Soviet” anachronisms some weeks ago, now come forward center-stage as an organic necessity arising from the midst of the protests.
Thus, our first task is to build the struggle and maintain it. The government’s authoritarian response to our movement is driving people to think about strategies and tactics that the liberal opposition have tried to discredit like a general strike to preserve our democracy.
IB & AS: What position should the international Left take in this situation? And what can we do to help Georgia’s struggle for self-determination, democracy, and equality?
LR: The international Left actually faces the same question as the Georgian Left — how to transcend the obscuring framework of a conflict between the EU and Russia. The key is to understand and explain how geopolitical rivalries are squeezing peripheral countries.
No one on the Left should expect any of the imperial powers — the US, EU, Russia, and China — to serve our interests. Whatever their rivalries, they share a predatory agenda and will support an authoritarian regime to ensure they can carry it out. Importantly, the inter-imperial competition and struggle for hegemony create new risks and vulnerabilities for the peripheral states that need to be taken seriously.
It would be nice for the international Left to engage with more Georgian leftists and activists. At this point, there is a strong tendency for much of it to search out people who confirm its inaccurate and misleading framework that Western imperialism is the sole culprit, indict a mass popular movement as its catspaw, and exonerate the local oligarchic regime.
If the international left follows these people’s lead it will end up supporting Georgian Dream’s rule over peripheral capitalism. Some on the Western left would benefit from stopping being so self-centered and limiting their critique to Western imperialism alone. I’m not asking them to not criticize the West, but to do it more seriously and to criticize non-Western actors as well. That’s the only way to uphold a consistent position to oppose not just the West but capitalism and imperialism without exception.
LN: My fundamental request to the international Left is to recognize our local agency, the agency of the Georgian people in our struggle for democracy against this authoritarian regime. Stop reiterating narratives of a “second Maidan,” and “color revolution.” It may make you feel righteous, but it leads you to betray us and apologize for the regime that is oppressing us.
Ia E: It is astonishing to me that people on the Left forget that people in the periphery have agency. It is a politics of despair. Our collective agency is the basis of solidarity in our country and with others throughout the world. Please stand with our struggle against Georgian Dream.
Ia Eradze is a political economist, with a research focus on finance in the post-socialist space. She is currently an associate professor at the Georgian Institute for Public Affairs (GIPA) and a CERGE-EI Foundation teaching fellow. She is also a researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Research, Ilia State University.
Luka Nakhutsrishvili teaches critical theory at Ilia State University Tbilisi and is a researcher and project coordinator at the Institute for Social and Cultural Research at the same university. He studies projects of modernity, popular resistance, and revolutionary culture in Georgia and the Caucasus.
Lela Rekhviashvili is a researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, specializing in political economy and regional geography, with a regional focus on post-socialist Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
Ilya Budraitskis is a editor with Posle Media.
Ashley Smith is a member of the Tempest Collective.
“The interests of capital are vocal from all sides”
DECEMBER 26, 2024
Labour Hub interviewed Georgian journalist Giorgi Chagelishvili about what lies behind the recent protests in his country.
Q: Earlier this year an estimated 200,000 people protested against the Georgian Government’s Proposed Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence. Why were the protests so big and what kind of people took part?
A: First, we have to start in 2023, from the moment when the Georgian Government brought up the Proposal for the first time when it bore a different name, the Foreign Agents Law. So almost from nowhere, at least for the general public, the Georgian Dream party labelled all kinds of non-profit organizations who took foreign donations (not less than 20 percent of their yearly budget) as Foreign Agents. In post-Soviet society ‘agent’ is a synonym for ‘spy’. So first of all, besides the questionable regulations that it meant to place on the table, the project had a political inclination aimed at discrediting every kind of social organization that was free of local party and business structures.
In Georgia most donations come from the West, from EU and US funds, and even from Georgian émigrés, through crowdfunding. The Proposal was seen as a blow, the start of a geopolitical shift away from the Western course, from a discursive destination that was seen as only salvation for the whole nation after the Republic got its independence from the USSR. From the first days of parliamentary debate, the Proposal was granted its second name, the Russian Law.
In 2023, due to the reactions it provoked in the form of a wave of protests, especially in the capital of the country, Tbilisi, the Proposal was cancelled. The Government promised it would drop the topic permanently.
Those were some of the reasons why the law, even with its softened title (but with exactly the same contents) caused a new wave of disturbances in 2024.
The protests were mostly concentrated in Tbilisi. NGOs and the opposition were leading them, but participation was broader, and included those who distanced their general positions from both, yet were linked to being pro-western.
2024 was an election year and despite the scale of the opposition to the second attempt, the Government had to be more decisive with its steps. So it passed.
After the aforementioned Proposal became law, the pre-election environment got tense and polarization deepened. The Government campaigned on the promise of putting an end to all kinds of opposition who were marked as agents of the ‘Global Party Of War’, in the event that it got a constitutional majority in parliament.
Q: Were these the same people who protested against this October’s general election results? What are the different social forces involved on each side of this divide?
A: Despite the problematic outcome of October’s general election, none of the mainstream parties enjoy trust and strong popular support. The opposition was unable to mobilize big protests in the streets. Despite that, polarization in the rhetoric of local political forces and the pressure on the government from outside were growing. Talk about rigged elections and upcoming sanctions from the West was becoming more and more intense.
A new wave of protests came after 28th November, when Irakli Kobakhidze, the Prime Minister and leader of the Georgian Dream party, announced they would not pursue the opening of EU membership negotiations until 2028. This was received as another clear step in the geopolitical turn.
The next day, clashes with the police started in front of Parliament. This time the protests involved more sections of society and even spread to the regions. Opposition parties and big NGOs stepped back behind the curtain from the riots, and it was mostly young people with mixed political views, from left to right, who took up the fight with law enforcement.
Outside of the political parties and donor-funded NGOs, Georgia lacks strong organizing forces. The biggest trade union is yellow and the rest are not strong enough to mobilize significant numbers of the working class. On top of that, Georgia lacks even a centre-left party we could call labour-oriented. All of that makes it impossible to define workers as a clearly distinct subject in action. Despite the lack of organization, the masses that came onto the streets were of course students, workers or middle class. Almost all of the leftist groups stood on the side of the protests.
Q: With a new president chosen and the outgoing president refusing to stand down, how can the political crisis be resolved – or will it just result in further social polarization?
A: There are too many hidden angles in the multipolarity of the ongoing events. Resolving the question lies in the hands of the politicians. As I see it, the Government has more grounds for stepping back, by opening negotiations and proposing at least some concessions.
Right now Georgia is moving between right wing authoritarianism and civil strife. The economic crisis and the growing involvement of geopolitical forces could make things worse.
Q: How significant are progressive political forces in Georgia and what are they calling for?
A: Left wing politics have been marginal since the collapse of the USSR. The country went through shock therapy after the 1990s and the so-called Rose Revolution brought even more neoliberal politics. Labour codes were nullified; unionization decreased tenfold.
Opposition to the past Government of the National Movement included newly-reborn left student groups. Changes in 2012 brought some small civil freedoms and labour rights.
The left has been growing since, finding itself in labour and environmental movements, making media, developing cultural spaces and autonomous trade unions. The movement in general has been spreading its ideas among young people and trying to find points of reconnection with workers and people of the older generation that had to go through the shock therapy and right wing anti-labour propaganda.
Q: There are some on the left in the West who see the upsurge in Georgia as another US-orchestrated ‘colour revolution’. How would you respond to this?
As we see it in Georgia, the country is one of the central regions of current multipolar confrontation. Especially after the Ukraine war, its geopolitical price has risen due to its place in potential trade routes between east and west.
The US is definitely involved, and has been supporting oppositional parties openly, supporting NGOs, threatening the Government with sanctions. But it is not only the US. The interests of capital are involved and vocal from all sides, like Russia, Ukraine, France, Hungary, Germany, Azerbaijan and even the Baltic states. All of those have their own interests.
In general, the public lacks a full picture of what lies behind the political curtain. But alongside geopolitical threats, a lot of us are concerned about the prospect of right-wing authoritarianism. This is being pushed by big local capital that is still trying to break the organizational structures the rest of society managed to create during the last twelve years, whether they were funded by western funds or purely by ordinary Georgians.
The lack of a nationwide leftist organization in the face of the interests of capital from all sides makes our state more precarious then we would like to hope.
Image: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024_Georgian_Protests,_May_2_b.jpg
Photo from the 2024 protests against the “Russian law” aka the “foreign agents” bill. Author: Zlad!, licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Thomas Steele says the crisis in Georgia is driven by imperialist rivalry between the West and Russia
Oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili supports Georgian Dream
Friday 20 December 2024
Protesters took to the streets of Georgia for the 22nd day in a row on Friday in the face of police brutality.
The ruling Georgian Dream won with 54 percent of the vote in elections in October. The party, led by Irakli Kobakhidze, suspended talks to join the European Union (EU) until 2028 the following month.
Since then, nightly protests have faced severe repression. Riot police, alongside hired thugs, have attacked protestors and journalists, those arrested have faced violence and even torture. In response, protesters turned to using fireworks to defend themselves.
Georgian Dream are a nasty lot and it is no surprise that many are turning out on the streets to defy them. The party is dominated by the billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who’s personal wealth equates to one third of Georgia’s gross domestic product. It has pushed rampant neoliberalism, violent crackdowns on protests and dissent and homophobia.
But the mainstream framing of the crisis in Georgia—the “pro-freedom” West defying “Russian-style authoritarianism”—is wrong. In reality, the crisis in Georgia is driven by imperialist rivalry between the West and Russia.
On the one hand, you have increasing competition between the US-led Nato warmongers’ alliance and Russia. Since the breakup of Stalinist Russia in 1991, the US saw Georgia as a vital state. It wanted to gain a foothold in the energy-rich Caucasus region on Russia’s southern border. And it has spent millions manufacturing consent for the West, particularly through NGOs.
The West denounced the election results, largely on the basis that Georgian Dream had better access to financial resources and the media. How does this differ from any election in any other capitalist society?
On the other hand, Russia also sees maintaining control over its Georgian neighbour as vitally important to its imperialist project. After Nato invited Ukraine and Georgia to join in 2008, it moved into the break-away regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia’s invasion was under the guise of protecting the “right of self-determination” it had so recently and so bitterly crushed in nearby Chechnya.
Since then, Putin has preferred the carrot over the stick, offering Georgia trade opportunities, visa-free travel and even free tuition for Georgian students in Russia. But the stick never remains far out of sight. Russian forces stationed in South Ossetia are just a short drive away from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi.
Georgia’s ruling class has tried to maintain access to both Western and Russian markets. Georgian Dream attempted to play both sides and applied for EU membership in 2022, but it also refused to join the bloc’s sanctions on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.
But this balancing act has become ever harder. That’s because imperialist rivalry between the West—the United States, Nato and the EU—and Russia has accelerated across eastern Europe and Asia.
The role of China, an increasingly important player in the region, is often overlooked. As of July 2023, China has been guaranteeing infrastructural investment for major highway projects. In May this year a Chinese company became the main partner in the construction of a Black Sea port after a US company dropped out. Increasing trade and collaboration with China is likely giving confidence to the Georgian government’s shift away from the West.
In this context, the election was posed as referendum. The opposition argued that the decision was between freedom and authoritarianism, Georgian Dream argued that it was a choice between war and peace. Problems that affect ordinary Georgians, whether low wages or high rents, were almost entirely absent from the debate.
For obvious reasons, Georgian Dream is certainly no friend of the people, despite posturing itself as the “anti-war” choice. But the opposition isn’t much better. They remain largely wedded to the politics of Mikhail Saakashvili and the United National Movement party, who ruled Georgia from 2004-2012.
Saakashvili oversaw radical right wing policies that smashed state services, increased state violence from the police and established a brutal system of mass incarceration. He transformed Georgia into a client state of George Bush during the “war on terror”. The idea that these people could masquerade as defenders of freedom is a joke.
Hope lies with working class people asserting their own demands, independent of both the West and Russia.
There are glimpses of such resistance. One example is the recent strike in the Tbilisi gaming company Evolution Gaming. The same hired thugs who attack people protesting over the EU are there to block and disrupt picket lines.
Georgian Dream is hostile to workers’ interests. At the same time, Evolution Gaming is an EU-based company attracted to Georgia due to the deregulation, poverty wages, and anti-worker legislation supported by both wings of the ruling class. For many involved in this struggle, the West’s intentions are clear.
There are other examples of how Georgians have stood up to the system and the authorities that back it up. For example, in January, 20 protestors were arrested during mass resistance to the eviction of a working-class family by a predatory landlord. In the small village of Sukruti, people opposed the destruction of their homes by mining giant Georgian Manganese through hunger strikes.
Even in the summer the protest movement against the Foreign Agents Bill asserted it was against all politicians.
Today, so long as the movement on the streets remains tied to the EU and the West, it will remain trapped in the dynamics of inter-imperialist rivalry. Only struggle from below, which opposed imperialism East and West, can provide a political alternative and deliver gains for ordinary people.
Resistance to Russian deal in Abkhazia
Protests shook the break-away state of Abkhazia on 15 November. Protestors stormed the parliament building and demanded the resignation of its leader. They used a truck to smash through the gates.
They tore metal railings that protected the building’s windows and climbed inside, refusing to leave. They did not in fact leave until they had successfully removed the president.
The root of the unrest is a backdoor deal struck between the government and Russia. This would allow Russian oligarchs and businesses to buy real estate on the Black Sea coastline, pricing out locals.
Abkhazia sits on the politically and economically important Black Sea. It shares borders with Russia and Georgia, which it broke away from in the 1990s.
Local elites weaponised nationalist identities across the former Soviet empire. A shared life of ethnically mixed Georgian and Abkhaz villages, workplaces, families, was replaced with violent ethnonationalism.
Following a series of brutal conflicts between Georgia and Abkhazia in the 90s and 2000s, Russian forces moved into the region in 2008. They have maintained a presence there ever since.
Abkhazia relies on the Russian presence to maintain their independence from Georgia, which denies the existence of an Abkhaz people and their right to a state. But support from Russia comes with big strings attached.
This includes access to ports, a new naval base to help with its war in Ukraine, huge economic leverage, and the right to permanently station military forces.
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