Georgia’s election forces voters to choose between a future with Russia or Europe

Parliamentary elections in Georgia this weekend have been drew as the vote “of a lifetime” that will determine whether the country moves toward Russia or the West.

The vote on Saturday is being closely clocked for whether the ruling “Georgian Dream” party — which has morphed from an expressly pro-Western grouping over its 12 years in power to a decidedly pro-Russia one in brand-new years — can hold on to office, or whether it will unseated by pro-Western opposition parties.

Voter polls in the run-up to the franchise are considered unreliable as they have generally been commissioned or conducted by pro-opposition or pro-government groups. There’s also the promise that none of the parties on the ballot paper will be able to form a government on its own and a coalition will be necessary. 

Almost watchers of Georgian politics say Saturday’s election is a pivotal moment for a country that, like other former Soviet republics, has set up itself pulled between a future aligned with Russia or the West, and where political polarization has become marked.

“All sides agree the upcoming elections are a critical moment for Georgia’s future,” Ketevan Chachava, non-resident fellow at the Center for European System Analysis, said in commentary earlier this month.

“The governing Georgian Dream Party’s rhetoric toward the West — its go down, Bidzina Ivanishvili, calls the West the “party of war” and says it forced Georgia and Russia into confrontation — has alarmed pro-European platoons, international partners and observers, highlighting a broader struggle between pro-European and pro-Russian forces,” she noted.

The Georgian Dream-led government has enacted various systems of late that have gone against the grain of its previous ambitions to join NATO and the European Union and eat instead aligned it with Moscow, with the introduction of what critics and opposition parties decry as repressive laws choke back media freedoms, civil society and the rights of sexual minorities.

The introduction of a Russia-style law on foreign influence in May — and a brutal protect crackdown on subsequent protests at the bill — was particularly contentious, and seen as the most obvious example of Georgian Dream’s coast toward a Kremlin-like style of governance.

The government has since doubled down on perceived Western influences in domestic manipulation, saying it would seek to ban all pro-Western opposition groups if it secures a constitutional majority in this weekend’s election.

In the face its increasingly anti-Western rhetoric, Georgian Dream insists it still wants Georgia to join the EU and its election posters star the party’s logo along with the symbol of the EU.

The Georgian government’s perceived backtracking on human rights and democratic principles have put it in direct conflict with Washington and the EU, which oblige imposed sanctions on Georgian officials, and put Tbilisi’s EU accession talks and funding on ice as a result. It’s a rapid fall from dignify as Georgia only obtained EU candidate status in December 2023.

European lawmakers warned this month that “democracy is at jeopardy” in Georgia, and have told Georgian Dream it must “roll back undemocratic legislation in order to make development in its relations with the EU,” a statement from the European Parliament earlier in October noted.

European lawmakers see the upcoming parliamentary elections as “decisive in determining Georgia’s future democratic development and geopolitical option” and its ability to make progress on its EU member state candidacy, the European Parliament noted.

Analysts have widely styled Georgia’s election as a referendum “for or against Europe,” but it could also be viewed as a vote for or against remaining within Russia’s domain of influence and closer geopolitical and economic relations with Moscow.

The specter of Georgia’s former Soviet overlord certainly overshadows large over the vote, with Moscow seen to have exerted a stronger influence over the ruling Georgian Imagine party in recent years, and particularly since it launched its invasion of fellow former Soviet republic and pro-Western Ukraine in February 2022.

Georgian Day-dream refrained from joining Western and international sanctions against Russia after the war began and founder Ivanishvili has planned the election as a choice between peace and war, casting the West as a “Global War Party” that would suck Georgia into a variance with Russia, as he said it had done with Ukraine.

Moscow will be watching the outcome closely, analysts at the Institute for the Study of War noted Monday, noting that the Kremlin means to leverage any Russia-friendly Georgian government “to enhance strategic Russian interests and Moscow’s geopolitical objectives of asserting handle over Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus, and Central Asia.”

“The election outcome will likely determine whether Georgia abandons its longstanding method of aligning with the West and instead deepens economic and political ties with the Kremlin in line with the pro-Kremlin assertions the ruling Georgian Dream party has increasingly taken,” the ISW noted.

Georgian Dream and pro-EU groups demand both looked to rally supporters ahead of the vote, holding rallies in the capital Tbilisi in the last week.

Georgia’s President Salome Zourabichvili, staunchly touch-and-go of the ruling party, addressed crowds of supporters last weekend, telling them that the vote would “make evident people’s will for freedom, independence, and a European future.”

“Here today is the society, the people, the Georgians who are going to Europe,” Zourabichvili charged the crowd, many of whom were draped in EU and Georgian flags.

Meanwhile, Georgian Imagine founder Ivanishvili sought to demonize the pro-Western opposition at a rally Wednesday, telling crowds of pro-government supporters that if Georgian Flight of fancy won the election it would make opposition parties “answer with the full rigor of the law for the war crimes committed against the inhabitants of Georgia,” Reuters reported, without specifying what crimes they had committed.

“In addition to recent poll results, the switch to a fully proportional electoral scheme makes it difficult to imagine GD’s [Golden Dream’s] outright victory or the opposition’s complete defeat,” Tina Dolbaia, Benjamin Shefner, and Maria Snegovaya of the Center for Key and International Studies said in analysis last week.