Georgia Staggers under a ‘Dozen Daggers’ as Protests Continue over Rigged Election Claims

A cold dawn broke over Tbilisi this morning. Under grey skies and in the drizzling rain perhaps a thousand people had gathered along the central thoroughfare of Rustaveli Avenue, waiting out the night to protest the convening of new parliament after fiercely contested elections marred by widespread reports of violence, intimidation, subterfuge and fraud. 

Shunning the session as illegitimate, the South Caucasian country’s president and opposition parties, whose members have uniformly rejected their parliamentary mandates, were not the only conspicuous absences from the hall as the ruling Georgian Dream party’s 89 MPs took their seats at noon. Ambassadors, diplomatic staff and other international representatives had also not been invited, under the pretext of “minimizing undue foreign influence” on proceedings from the very same officials once considered friends. 

This furtive self-inauguration, which President Salome Zurabishvili has challenged in Georgia’s constitutional court, is only the latest chapter in the long-running political crisis that has all but engulfed the country since the outbreak of war in Ukraine more than two and a half years ago. One that has witnessed a rapidly accelerating descent into violent authoritarianism as part of what critics describe as a wider effort by the ruling party to reorient a once Western-facing nation, part-occupied by Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, back toward Moscow’s orbit. 

“You can see it in people’s faces on public transport and in the stores – that sense of anxiety, that sense of political and economic downfall,” Sandro Gudiashvili, a philosophy student at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University, told Byline Times. “I don’t want to see my country Russified, and the direction the government is taking us in, it’s a totally Russian way of doing things.”

Fear and Loathing in Zugdidi: Dirty Tricks on the Georgian Campaign Trail

Amid mounting authoritarianism and widespread allegations of election-rigging, will Georgia’s democracy survive parliamentary polls scheduled for 26 October?

Will Neal

Overall, however, the atmosphere outside parliament this morning was hardly one of optimism and hope, with the numbers representing only the tiniest fraction of the hundreds and thousands turned out in protest against the government’s draconian legislative agenda in months past. “It’s like a funeral out here,” as another protester put it, reflecting on the general air of exhaustion and low morale as efforts continue to force a reckoning with Georgian Dream’s alleged orchestration of a systemic and multifaceted scheme to rig the October 26th election.

Evidence of rigging is not hard to come by. Even before the recent vote was held, Byline Times reported how Georgian Dream appeared to be mobilising members of the country’s 300,000-strong public employment sector under threats of job loss to bolster their election campaign, announcing a raft of demographically-targeted investment pledges as well as allegedly siphoning funds out of the state budget for party political purposes. 

Election monitors and local watchdogs have since meticulously documented a staggering variety of violations, from alleged instances of vote buying, multiple voting and breaches of voter secrecy to misuse of government resources and personnel, obstruction of observer activity, and mass coercion, intimidation and violence against opposition representatives and supporters. 

“In all this, democracy was taken down by a dozen daggers, not a single smoking gun,” as Hans Gutbrod, a professor of public policy at Ilia State, described it in a recent report summarising the wealth of evidence to date. “The overall findings, alongside many statistical anomalies, show that the official results do not reflect the will of the Georgian people.”

‘Georgia’s bid to Muzzle Media and NGO’s and the Russian-Made Oligarch Behind it’

Top level discussions between Georgian government officials and their party’s oligarch founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, provide insights into the motivation for resurrecting a draft law that prompted two nights of rioting last year, reports Will Neal

Will Neal

Despite the early warning signs, those results would nevertheless appear to have blindsided the country’s various pro-Western opposition groups, who had otherwise set aside bitter historic rifts to campaign on a united platform for restoring Georgia’s prospects for EU membership after accession talks were placed on indefinite hold following the government’s controversial introduction of a Kremlin-style law on ‘foreign influence’ earlier this year. 

An apparent absence of contingency planning and resulting lack of perceived strategy has drawn criticism from some, though Marika Mikiashvili, a member of the opposition Droa party, explains this was partly borne of the practical challenges of managing a diverse coalition force, as well as an unwillingness to apply immediate pressure post-polls to already protest-weary voters. “We had to put the very limited resources that we have as the opposition into campaigning for victory,” she said, “and so we didn’t have the luxury of having all the infrastructure ready to go the day after the elections took place.” 

“We already know that emotional outbursts mean nothing to this regime, and we knew that it would take tactical planning,” she added. “Even if we’d been ready resource-wise on the 27th, I don’t think there would necessarily have been more people out.”

With the exception of large-scale rallies in the week after the vote, demonstrations so far have indeed proven scattered, many of them spearheaded by local student groups who have in turn met with significant violence from police and state security forces. One woman, Natia Dzidiguiri, even claims to have been sexually harassed as she was detained last week, with a handful of others facing up to seven years in prison for allegedly resisting arrest. 

“We have to understand that the protests right now are fairly divided up between different actors – there are opposition parties, civil society groups and various activists. Sometimes they work separately, sometimes they work together,” said Katie Shoshiashvili, a senior corruption researcher at Transparency International Georgia. “Who takes initiative for what is not super clear, but right now I don’t think it should be a question of who sits down for coffee with who – we simply need to be united in ensuring the will of the Georgian people is upheld.”

The results have naturally raised significant concern among Georgia’s historic international partners. President Joe Biden said in an October 29th statement the White House is “deeply alarmed by the country’s recent democratic backsliding, including the enactment of legislation mirroring Russian laws that restrict fundamental freedoms,” calling on Georgian Dream to “transparently investigate all election irregularities.”

But while the European Union has pledged to send an independent post-election assessment mission in the coming weeks, further reallocating to civil society more than 121 million euros otherwise earmarked for state aid, incoming enlargement commissioner Marta Kos has also suggested the accession process could be resumed in good faith in the highly unlikely event the ruling party pulls a u-turn on the authoritarian track that saw those talks suspended in the first place. 

Coupled with reports that some EU officials already feel, in the absence of a well-coordinated political opposition or large-scale popular movement, the need to engage with a Georgian Dream government may sooner or later prove inevitable, the odds of successfully challenging the outcome of the recent election would, for now, appear just as uncertain as when the polls closed almost a month ago.