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The fires leapt high. Putrid black clouds roiling inward above ferocious orange and red flames licking at dumpsters, scooters, restaurant chairs and park benches dragged across the road.
Shouts of “Russian slaves” hurled at the lines of riot police some twenty feet back from the barricades, the freezing November air tanged by a foul and drifting amalgam of tear gas, burning plastic and pepper spray.
Last night’s demonstrations unfolded with a fury Tbilisi has not seen since the riots of March 2023, when tens of thousands took to the streets in protest against the government’s abortive first attempt to pass a Kremlin-inspired law on ‘foreign influence’ targeting pro-democracy actors and critical voices.
Grimly etched into the hearts and minds of those out on Rustaveli Avenue into the early hours of this morning, gasmask-clad and wrapped in Georgian and EU flags, was everything that has happened in the year and a half since.
War in Ukraine has entirely upended Georgia’s political landscape. Amid the ongoing conflict, the ruling Georgian Dream party, under the shadow leadership of its Russian-made founder, billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has torpedoed relations with the US and the EU, embarking on a violent campaign of authoritarian reforms critics say are designed to inch it back toward Moscow’s orbit.
Georgian Dream’s triumph at October’s parliamentary polls prompted an outpouring of congratulations from other autocratic regimes — Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Kremlin propagandists, Azerbaijan’s despot and Venezuela’s dictator — equalled only by deep scepticism from long-standing international partners over the breadth and scale of alleged electoral abuses whereby the government appeared to have secured its victory.
In the weeks since, damning evidence has emerged of what opposition leaders and civil society watchdogs describe as a concerted, coordinated and multifaceted rigging scheme.
Recent reports have outlined countless alleged instances of vote buying, multiple voting and breaches of voter secrecy, along with a systemic abuse of public resources for party-political purposes, and a mass campaign of coercion, intimidation and violence against opposition representatives and supporters.
Prior to last night, protests were relatively scattered, organised by a variety of different pro-democracy actors and sparsely attended by demoralised and exhausted voters, many of whom feel disillusioned by the political opposition’s perceived failures on the campaign and in the election’s aftermath.
With perhaps only a thousand protesters gathered outside in the drizzling rain, Georgian Dream assembled for the first session of a new parliament on Monday in breach of the country’s constitution, given an ongoing legal challenge to the election results from Georgia’s pro-Western president, Salome Zurabishvili, who was conspicuously absent from the hall.
Opposition MPs, who have uniformly rejected their parliamentary mandates, similarly boycotted the session.
The ruling party has since announced a new candidate for the presidency, anti-Western firebrand Mikheil Kavelashvili, who on 14 December is slated to be the first appointed under new laws not by popular vote, but an electoral college decried by many as entirely comprised of staunch Georgian Dream loyalists.
By Thursday afternoon, officials had convened again at parliament to approve their new cabinet, with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze using the session to renew his government’s previous threats of outlawing Georgia’s various political opposition groups.
“Unfortunately, these people are still called the opposition,” he told the half-deserted hall. “Today, their seats are empty, but it must be said that even if they were sitting here, these seats would be just as vacant as they are now.”
Across the continent, members of the European Parliament had similarly assembled to vote on a non-binding resolution concerning the election.
The motion passed with an overwhelming majority, marking an explicit rejection of Georgian Dream’s legitimacy as the new government and calling for the vote to be re-staged within a year.
Kobakhidze, Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze, Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili and party founder Ivanishvili were singled out as targets for personal sanctions.
Kobakhidze later announced at a press conference that EU accession negotiations, already effectively on hold since Georgian Dream passed its controversial ‘foreign agents’ law amid mass protests in May, would not be “on the agenda during the current parliament”. and that the country would be suspending its constitutionally-enshrined aspirations for EU membership “until the end of 2028”.
Some 80% of the Georgian public have shown repeated support for one day joining the bloc.
Further fuel was added to the crisis by Vladimir Putin. Speaking at a press conference in the Kazakh capital of Astana, the Russian President said: “When the events began in Georgia, I was, frankly, surprised to observe it all. We have no relationship with them, with the leadership of Georgia, but I was simply impressed by their courage and character in defending their point of view.”