REPCO

Across the city of Tbilisi, posters show a bombed-out Ukrainian school, neighbourhood, motorway and church on the left, and a renovated Georgian school, neighbourhood, motorway and church on the right. The message is as eloquent as the imagery: the overt aim is to instil fear and divide the population.

Tbilisi, Georgia's capital city of one and a half million people, is full of election advertisements, both on government propaganda billboards and on public transport. The vast majority of the adverts trumpet the messages of the ruling Georgian Dream, with only a small fraction devoted to the four opposition parties.

Moreover, the fear of war in Ukraine resonates much more strongly with the Georgian people than in other countries in the region. The last time Russia bombed and annexed two 'breakaway' Georgian provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, was in 2008, not to mention the horrors of war in the country in the 1990s. "Georgians still remember the open wound of the 2008 war, which makes them much more vulnerable to government propaganda that plays on their emotions and fears and tries to manipulate them towards an anti-EU stance," explains Nino Nakashidze, deputy director of the leading opposition TV channel Mtavari Arkhi.

Asked by HVG what the difference was between the erosion of democracy in Georgia and what happened in Hungary, Badri Japaridze, leader of the opposition party LELO, replied that "if we lose these elections, we will lose this state, unlike Hungary, which will remain an EU state under EU law". But Japaridze is hopeful that Georgia's new electoral rules, which introduce full proportional representation, will allow the opposition to successfully unite against the ruling party this year, unlike in Hungary's 2022 parliamentary elections. 

And once the government's communications machine, set up to discredit TI, was up and running, TI quickly signalled that it was happy to withdraw from the election monitoring process. This was followed by international statements questioning the fairness and credibility of the elections. As a result, the government stopped 'enforcing' the law on agents, at least temporarily, and TI was left to count the votes. Incidentally, only 2 per cent of the country's 10,000 NGOs and media organisations registered by the deadline, showing the extent of public opposition to the government's authoritarian excesses.

Elene Khoshtaria, leader of the opposition liberal Droa party and former Georgian minister for Euro-Atlantic integration, said that "the only independent institution is that of the largely formal Georgian president". He adds that only the president represents, at least in part, the interests of citizens. Everything else, such as the judiciary, education, media and electoral rules, is at the mercy of the government and its vested interests.

A good illustration of the power of state institutions is the nine-point agenda for restoring democracy set out in President Salome Zurabishvili's Georgian Charter for Democracy, published in May 2024 and signed by all opposition parties:

1. Abolish laws harmful to the country's European course.

2. reform of the judiciary to restore public confidence

3. the independence of law enforcement and security institutions from political influence

4. the establishment of independent anti-corruption and regulatory bodies.

5. Restore the independence of the National Bank.

6. Improve the electoral system to ensure free and fair elections.

7. hold early elections once the Charter has been fulfilled.

8. Establishment of a professional government without politics.

9. unity and democratic elections for a European future.

Indeed, at the end of its third term, the government has stepped up its anti-Western integration rhetoric, legislation and dismantling of the system of checks and balances to such an extent that in recent months EU representatives have sent increasingly strong messages questioning the EU integration ambitions of the current ruling party.

Most recently, following the European Parliament's resolution a week ago, the EU27 Heads of State and Government, in Council conclusions adopted at the EU Summit on 17 October, indicated their readiness to support the Georgian people on their European path. At the same time, they "expressed their serious concern about the actions of the Georgian government, which are contrary to the fundamental values of the European Union".

The Georgian government came to this conclusion about the EU after Brussels first laid out a 12-point list of criteria for candidate status, but then granted the country candidate status at the end of 2023 even if these criteria were not met. This appears to have caused concern in Moscow, which has told Ivanishvili's party to do everything in its power to block the country's Euro-Atlantic integration.

As a result, the government in Tbilisi has been a prime target for Brussels over the past year, with the adoption of the so-called 'Russian law', which was passed at the second attempt and is known in our country as the 'foreign agents law'. Then they did Brussels no favours by adopting rules to make it easier for Russian offshore funds to enter the country, by passing anti-gay family protection laws, and by making it easier to remove judges, to name only the most important.

 According to Alexander Kevkhishvili, a senior corruption expert at Transparency Georgia, the office, which was officially set up to investigate corruption cases, has not uncovered any economic abuse since it was established five years ago. On the contrary, all opposition parties and their leaders are being investigated for corruption. In his own experience, LELO leader Yaparidze told journalists that he had been summoned several times to the Anti-Corruption Bureau for 'questioning', and in one of these interviews he was told flatly that he was free to leave the country in the hope of not returning, to which 'opportunity' he responded with a firm 'no'.

This article was written as part of a fact-finding journalism trip organised by n-ost and funded by Erste Stiftung. It is republished as part of the of the PULSE project, a European initiative supporting cross-border journalistic cooperation.