Georgia’s Election: A referendum on a country’s place in the world
Last weekend, the small, former Soviet Republic of Georgia—a country of 3.7m people whose territory lies within the tectonic folds between the Greater and Lesser Caucasus Mountains—held parliamentary elections.
The result was victory for the ruling “Georgian Dream” party founded by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili in 2012, which according to Georgia’s electoral commission won 53.8% of the popular vote.
In Georgia’s system of strict proportional representation, this will give Georgian Dream, which has ruled Georgia since 2012, a comfortable majority (89 of the 150 seats in parliament), but not the super-majority required to change the constitution. The highly fragmented opposition (whose four major parties won 44% of the vote together) denounced Georgian Dream’s victory as fraudulent and refused to recognize the result. So did Georgia’s president, Salome Zourabichvili (a former French diplomat who spent most of her career serving the Fifth Republic). In fact, Zourabichvili went much further. Describing the election as a “total fraud, a total taking away of your votes” in a national broadcast made (with opposition leaders at her side) immediately after the result was announced, she denounced the election as nothing less than a “Russian special operation”.
Salome Zourabichvili, President of Georgia
“This election cannot be recognized, because it is the recognition of Russia’s intrusion here, Georgia’s subordination to Russia,” Zourabichvili said in a statement very unlikely to moderate tempers. She called on all Georgians—“witnesses and victims,” she said, of a “modern form of hybrid war against the Georgian people”—to demonstrate against the election result in the streets of the country’s capital, Tbilisi.
Tbilisi Downtown, Georgia
When tens (but, it must be said, not hundreds) of thousands of Tbilisi’s residents did so on Monday night, Zourabichvili reiterated her inflammatory rhetoric.
“You did not lose the elections. Your vote was stolen, and they tried to steal your future as well,” Zourabichvili announced to the crowd carrying pro-EU and pro-US placards (often in English) before repeating her allegation of Russian interference in an election she again described as an “unprecedented, pre-planned operation that robbed us of our votes, our parliament, and our constitution.”
Tbilisi, Georgia-October 28 2024. People gathered in center of Tbilisi to protest the results of parliamentary elections held on October 26 2024
The following day Georgia’s electoral commission agreed to vote recounts at five randomly chosen polling stations in each of the country’s 189 electoral districts.
The result and its aftermath exemplify Georgia’s complex relationship with its huge northern neighbour as well as the tensions that lie beneath what is outwardly a remarkably homogeneous population, where some 86 per cent identify themselves as ethnically Georgian and slightly less, 83 per cent, as members of the Georgian Orthodox Church, but which is, in fact, increasingly highly polarized—for Georgian Dream and its brand of national-religious “populism” or against.
Wherever the visitor goes in Georgia, he or she will find reminders that this is a very proud and nationally self-conscious people, whose understanding of themselves as a nation is intimately bound with the country’s historical Eastern Orthodox religion. The country’s distinctive red-and-white flag—a St George’s Cross (like England’s), with four Greek crosses in the remaining corner fields—is both ubiquitous and clearly (after seventy years of officially-imposed Soviet atheism) an unabashedly Orthodox Christian symbol. And this is where “the rub” for modern Georgia sets in.
Flags of the country of Georgia and European Union and Council of Europe fly in Europe Square in downtown Tbilisi, with the Narikala Fortress in the background.
On the one hand, Georgia is one of the world’s oldest continuously-existing nations: the line of (very often sainted) Georgian kings and queens who created the medieval kingdom which the modern Georgian State considers itself the historical successor of was founded in the fourth century AD. Especially celebrated—their icons prominently displayed and ardently venerated in all Georgian Orthodox churches—are the great King St David the Builder (1089-1125) and his great-granddaughter, “King” St Tamar (1184-1213).
Jvari Monastery with Mtskheta town and river background
Additionally, the land is dotted with hundreds of often extremely evocatively situated Orthodox churches and monasteries, many of them (Jvari, Samtavro, Bodbe) connected with the legend of the country’s spiritual founder, the young fourth-century virgin and woman missionary, St Nino, whose personal cross—two vine stocks woven together with her own hair—is held as one of Georgia’s holiest relics in Tbilisi’s Sioni cathedral.
Sioni Cathedral in Old Town of Tbilisi, Georgia
This last, in the heart of the capital, is itself the seat of the 91-year-old Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II (1977-present), the embodiment of Georgia’s long history as well as the country’s most approved figure and beloved spiritual father of the nation. (Together, the Army and the Church are Georgians’ two most trusted institutions.)
On the other hand, the modern Republic of Georgia is also one of the world’s more recently created nation-States. Subject from the sixteenth century to ever-more violent and destructive invasion by Shia Persia (whose Shah Abbas burned the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, to the ground in 1797), the last Georgian king surrendered what was left of his country to the Russians—in principle, a fellow Eastern Orthodox people—for protection in 1801. After almost two hundred years of first Tsarist and then Soviet domination, Georgia has been an independent State only since 1991 (when, incidentally, the coat-of-arms of the last Georgian king, Georgi XII (1798-1800) was revived, crown and all, as one of the new republic’s national symbols).
At that time, and until perhaps only very recently, the national consensus was that it was Russia—and the 145m or so Russians on the other side of the Caucasus—from which Georgia would henceforth (and probably ever after) need protecting. This almost unanimously-held belief led to one of the most earnest and uncritical reorientations of foreign, defence, and, inevitably, cultural policy witnessed anywhere in the former Soviet and Eastern bloc.
Having been not only in many ways a favoured Soviet Socialist republic (always over-represented per capita in what were known as “all-Union” Party and State structures and where living standards, including somewhat mysteriously-generated disposable incomes, were always among the USSR’s highest) but also the often very proud homeland of Stalin, Georgia (which remains the only country in the world with an active Stalin Museum) in the early 2000s threw itself at the feet of the United States and Europe.
Joseph Stalin Museum, Gori. Photo credit Vladimer Shioshvili
The achievement of NATO and the EU membership was enshrined in Georgia’s constitution as constitutionally-mandated objective for every future government, while under the Harvard-educated Mikheil Saakashvili (president, 2008-13), Georgia was, per capita, the largest contributor to the United States-led coalition of occupying Powers in what for Georgia—whose geography establishes it as a country not in Europe or the North Atlantic at all but one squarely on the northern rim of the Middle East—is nearby Iraq.
Former President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili
That Russia was a threat to Georgia’s national existence was apparently confirmed in the whole nation’s eyes when, having already supported the secession of the north-eastern region of Abkhazia in 1992, Russia occupied the central Georgian province of Southern Ossetia (to Georgians, the “Tskhinvali region”) in 2009. These events have left around two fifths of Georgian territory under de facto Russian control. Today, Russian-controlled Southern Ossetia is barely a half-hour drive from the centre of Tbilisi, and the territory can be seen, but not entered, from the highways running west towards the Black Sea and north into the Greater Caucasus and the heavily-trafficked, high alpine Darial Pass that connects Georgia to Russia itself.
Caucasian Mountains in South Ossetia
For all these reasons, then, Zourabichvili’s allegations of Russian interference in Georgia’s election will have appeared to many Georgians as entirely plausible and, if real, a genuine threat to the nation’s existence. Indeed, no visitor to Tbilisi can fail to miss the outpouring of anti-Russian sentiment inscribed on the walls of the city’s buildings, where since 2022 curses have rained down on Russia and its President Vladimir Putin alongside the stencilled outlines of a triplet of Georgian, Ukrainian, and EU flags. On the busy arterial road linking Tbilisi to Russian Vladikavkaz over the mountains, the owner of a popular pit stop has made—in a move clearly aimed at Russian truckers—acknowledgement of Putin as a war criminal a condition of entry.
Zourabichvili’s allegations have also, moreover, received the implicit corroborating endorsement of both the United States and European Union: both President Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, without naming Russia, have lent their a priori support to Zourabichvili and the opposition’s claims.
And yet, as the Associated Press has noted in its reporting from Tbilisi when pressed to substantiate her claims, Zourabichvili “did not provide specific details or present evidence of Russia’s involvement in vote theft.”
The problem is that, far from being neutral observers, the United States and EU were themselves parties to Georgia’s election, with long established links with the domestic Georgian NGOs (such as Civil Georgia) that support the opposition. As the Organization for Security Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has noted, the election was in many ways a referendum on geopolitics. Would Georgia continue to pursue closer and closer alignment with the West—or would she put on the brakes and seek some sort of rapprochement with her old protector, colonial master, and once again increasingly important trading partner, Russia (with which, not at all incidentally, she now of course shares the same generally very culturally conservative Eastern Orthodox religion)? Significantly, too, while in this referendum, the sympathies of the authors of the OSCE report clearly lay with the West, yet the OSCE’s assessment of the election was far less bleak than Zurabashvili’s. No allegations, let alone evidence, of a Russian “special operation” appear in the report filed by its election monitors. On the contrary, while the OSCE did note “frequent compromises in vote secrecy and several procedural inconsistencies, as well as reports of intimidation... that negatively impacted public trust,” nonetheless election day, it said, “was generally procedurally well-organized and administered in an orderly manner”.
Just how intentionally the United States and EU have sought to court Georgians’ allegiance in this contest is visible in the 17-year-old NATO-EU Information Centre which, draped in NATO and EU flags, occupies a large building prominently situated on Tbilisi’s central Liberty Square and carries out more than 800 “public education” events every year (and whose very name somewhat gives the lie to longstanding NATO and EU claims in regard to the origins of the Ukraine War that the umbilical linking of these two institutions is merely Russian propaganda).
For this reason, as some have observed, Zourabichvili’s response to the election plausibly appeared calculated to create the pretext for a Georgian “Maidan”. That has not yet happened but it cannot, it seems to me, be ruled out. Time will tell what happens next.
THE CAUCASUS
AZERBAIJAN, GEORGIA & ARMENIA
Join Dr Matthew Dal Santo on this 19-day tour as we discover the region’s diverse heritage, ancient churches, monasteries and castles which form a rich legacy of the empires that shaped it.
