The political crisis in Georgia, caused by a disputed election, carries on, overshadowed by events in the United States and Ukraine. But everything is connected: what is going on in Georgia has its own local dynamics, but is also part of a bigger global trend.

In Georgia, electoral malpractice by the Georgian Dream ruling party and a retreat from democracy meets geopolitical hedging and experimentation with a new illiberal European model. How Europe responds to this gambit will be watched in many other countries.

The domestic situation has been deadlocked since the parliamentary election held on 26 October. Georgian Dream almost certainly stole the election and is now trying to face down an opposition which probably won it but also lacks a critical mass of active public support to mount an effective challenge. The four main opposition parties look set to boycott the new parliament, which is likely to convene as a delegitimized one-party assembly, consisting of MPs solely from the ruling party. The government looks determined to consolidate its grip on power by implementing punitive legislation (‘The Foreign Influence Law’), which will restrict or shut down Georgia’s non-governmental organisations and may follow through on a threat to ban opposition parties.

Since 1992 Georgia has been a flawed democracy, in which successive ruling parties amassed power but were constrained by some checks and balances and by the framework of a shared national project to join the West. Fourth-term Georgian Dream is trying to jettison that framework. Compromise looks all but impossible: there can hardly be a deal between two antagonists who have a history of bad blood and call each other ‘traitors,’ while Western mediators, who were invited in the past to resolve domestic political disputes, are now ipso facto unacceptable.

The ruling party’s ambition looks to be the full capture of Georgian state institutions, in defiance of Western scrutiny and large parts of society. It can do so in large part thanks to the deep pockets of its founder and chairman Bizdina Ivanishvili, who remains by a long distance Georgia’s richest man – worth almost $5 billion according to Forbes’ estimate – and who can out-spend all rivals. Paranoia and fear of retribution drive the maximalist response. The protection of Ivanishvili’s personal business empire and the survival of the regime are elided with the message that the goal is to protect Georgian state sovereignty.

The calculation is also that it is easier to get away with electoral theft than it used to be. Georgian Dream’s leaders will naturally see Donald Trump’s victory in the United States as proof that their illiberal transactional mode of politics is now the new normal. In the words of Georgian analyst and former diplomat Natalie Sabanadze, writing a year ago, this retreat from democracy is a ‘local show of the global theatre‘.

Will Georgian Dream’s local show be a success? Undemocratic partners, such as Hungary, China, Turkey, and Iran, all supported the party and congratulated it on winning the election. Moscow approved the result, even though it still has no diplomatic relations with Georgia.

Not so most Western countries, including the United States and the European Union, who have not recognised the results, but are still working out their strategy. European Council president Charles Michel said, ‘there are suspicions, serious suspicions of fraud, which demand a thorough investigation’. A joint statement by the leaders of France, Germany and Poland, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Donald Tusk also called out irregularities and called for an investigation. They said that Georgia’s accession process to the EU was now effectively frozen.

What impact this condemnation will have in practice is unclear in a geopolitical moment when the illiberal weather is being set by Putin, Trump and Trump’s favourite European ally, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban.

Orban is a pivotal figure. He has already invested a great deal of political capital in Georgia and congratulated Georgian Dream on its victory even before the official result was announced. Previously he had invited Georgian Dream leaders to Budapest to his far-right conspiracy-fest CPAC. Orban was instrumental in the party’s conversion from one that used to align with the European centre-left to one modelled on his own party, which adopts the far-right language of ‘defending Christian civilisation’.

Orban also approved Georgia being awarded EU candidate status in 2023 – according to his particular understanding of what EU enlargement means and how the EU must be changed from within. Orban’s pitch is that of a different post-liberal transactional union, in which ‘colonial’ Brussels yields power to member-states and allows them a ‘sovereign’ right to curtail democratic institutions and to do business with whoever they want. EU accession for Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and the countries of the western Balkans is seen as a two-sided give-and-take bargaining process, not a one-way transfer of EU norms.

There is little doubt that Georgian Dream rigged the election, but the margin of the fraud is harder to determine. This was not a case of the kind of industrial-scale election stealing we see in other parts of the post-Soviet space, from Belarus to Tajikistan. Georgia’s vote was a tale of two elections. In Tbilisi and other big towns it was adjudged to be more or less fair (even though the media landscape was heavily skewed towards the ruling party); in rural Georgia, where all governing parties have always had a massive advantage, there was comprehensive evidence of vote-buying, manipulation, intimidation and outright fraud.

Crucially, the introduction of fully electronic voting, something initially welcomed by the opposition and civil society groups, has made it harder to track the trail of electoral abuse. The self-declared winner is exploiting this, and that is why Western politicians are using their language carefully, calling for a ‘fact-finding mission’ and ‘investigation’ into the vote.

Not much was needed to manipulate the results to tip a small opposition majority of votes into one for Georgian Dream, which was eventually awarded 54 per cent of the vote.

Two US polling firms, Edison and Harris, released results of exit polls of 12,000 voters just after the polls had closed, which gave a snapshot of citizens’ sentiments. The two firms, forecast that Georgian Dream would win 40.9 or 42 per cent of the vote respectively and that the combined totals for the four main opposition parties were 54 and 48 percent of the vote. This was in line with what Georgian analysts had been predicting; even Ivanishvili, Georgian Dream’s leader, had admitted that the public was ‘weary’ of its party, after three terms in office.

After the officials results were announced, one of the two pollsters, Edison, declared, ‘The 13-point difference between Edison’s estimate and the official result of 54 per cent for Georgian Dream cannot be explained by normal variation alone and suggests local-level manipulation of the vote.’ The other firm, HarrisX, said the variance between its exit poll and official results in some areas was ‘statistically impossible’. For example, in the Marneuli region its exit poll found that 40 per cent of voters were backing Georgian Dream. The official result was 80 per cent.

These projections were suggestive of an outcome similar to the one in Poland’s election last year, in which PiS, the illiberal ruling party, came in first place in voters’ preference with 35 per cent of the vote, but the combined opposition vote was larger.

This outcome would still have revealed a divided Georgia. Unlike Poland, Georgia also has no Tusk, no obvious popular alternative leader in waiting. The opposition consists of four parties who agreed they were against Georgian Dream but are also suspicious of one another. In particular, the legacy of the former ruling party of ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili, the United National Movement (UNM), hangs heavy. The abuses it committed still make the party a toxic brand for many Georgian voters who do not want to see it come near government again.

Another significant part of society is less politicised. In an opinion poll from 2023 62 per cent of respondents said that no party represented their interests. The ruling party will try to exploit a mixture of fear and apathy among these citizens, who may accept the status quo because they are worried about a return to the political instability and violence Georgia suffered in the 1990s.

This is one reason why the opposition is finding it hard to mount a challenge to the rigged election. The rallies it has held since the election are substantial, but not as big as they were earlier in the year against the ‘Foreign Influence Law’.

The zeitgeist also feels very different. This is not 2003, the year of Georgia’s peaceful Rose Revolution, or 2013, the year of Ukraine’s Euromaidan. Western influence is seen to be much weaker.

Georgian Dream’s leaders can smell Western hesitancy. For the last year they have tried to force their critics onto the defensive by using attack as a form of defence and are now escalating that tactic.

One of line of attack is to tar the entire opposition with the brush of the excesses committed by the former ruling party, accusing everyone of being the ‘collective UNM’. This is a distortion. UNM is a declining force in Georgia and many opposition voters, comprised of what could be called a ‘democratic protest electorate’, are opposed in principle to abuse of power by all ruling parties, past and present.

Another attack line from Ivanishvili and his ministers is to accuse unnamed Western politicians of being a shadowy ‘global party of war’, which allegedly works with the opposition to effect regime change in Georgia (another Maidan or Rose Revolution) and drag the country into conflict with Russia. This is also misinformation. Some European parliamentarians do remain close to the UNM, but if Western governments are the ‘global party of war’, how come they worked so closely with the government until recently and the EU offered Georgia candidate status only one year ago? Western officials have been tough on anything in Georgia that resembles sanctions-busting, but have not demanded that it sever trade relations with Russia, still less join the Ukraine war.

Which brings us to the Russia factor. Russia poses a real threat to Georgia, but probably only if it prevails decisively in the war in Ukraine. Its security presence in the South Caucasus is diminishing, while its economic leverage remains strong. Russia is also a bogeyman, blamed for committing crimes in which the fingerprints usually turn out to be local.

Many Georgian politicians’ language on Russia and claims about its role in their domestic politics are hyperbolic. Opposition leaders have persistently labelled Georgian Dream a ‘Russian project’ and its leaders Russian stooges, without more than a few scraps of supporting evidence.

The president Salome Zourabishvili, who has limited powers, (she used to be with Georgian Dream but has now thrown in her lot with the opposition in the name of Georgia’s Europe future) called the election fraud a ‘Russian special operation’. However, unlike in Moldova, where there was strong evidence of Russian interference in the election, no evidence has emerged of direct Russian influence – the electoral fraud was almost certainly designed locally.

Some Western politicians, and parts of the Western media, have piled in, too. Boris Johnson decried ‘Putin’s puppet government in Tbilisi’. At an opposition rally in Tbilisi, eight European parliamentarians spoke to the crowd and one invoked Ukraine’s famous war slogan ‘Russian ship go fuck yourself!’

This kind of rhetoric probably works to Georgian Dream’s advantage; it feeds the narrative that it is a centrist ‘party of peace,’ resisting Western globalist efforts to force Georgia into war with Russia.

Thus far the ruling party’s public posture on Russia has been cleverly ambiguous, hedged with deniability. Its leaders never mention the name ‘Putin.’ They have not pledged to re-open diplomatic relations with Moscow, broken after the war of 2008. Instead they engage in ‘virtue-signalling’ to Russia, blaming the West for over-promising support to Georgia in 2008 and for dragging Ukraine into war in 2022. They justify the increase in trade with Russia as being good for the Georgian economy.

Georgian Dream evidently believes that they can muddle through the crisis without suffering long-term damage. The bet may be that a divided Europe will decide that this is no time to break relations decisively with Georgia, and that they can do business with a new US administration, which does not care about advocating democratic change but believes in ‘Christian values’.

Political analyst Dmitri Moniava wrote: ‘Ivanishvili probably believes that a “pause of uncertainty” will allow him to strengthen his position, and when the fog clears, the West will have to – albeit with reservations – accept the status quo in Georgia.’

The ambition appears to be to join the club of non-aligned powers, alongside Azerbaijan, Turkey, Serbia and (to some degree) Hungary, who do business with everybody but are owned by nobody. Moniava, the Georgian commentator, uses the derogatory German term Schaukelpolitik (‘swing politics’) to describe the tactic.

Will it work for Georgia?

Cooling active engagement with the West necessarily means doing more business and accommodating with your close neighbours, Russia, Iran and Turkey.

Geography matters of course and Russia and Turkey are currently Georgia’s main bilateral trading partners; but historians and sociologists will have words of warning for this kind of determinism. Georgia’s modern national identity has been formed in opposition to those three countries, all of whom ran Georgia for long periods as imperial powers. A long streak of anti-Russian feeling runs across society, from westernised intellectuals with roots in early 20th-century pro-European movements to Georgian nativists, who resent Russia for having crushed Georgian independence and subordinated its Orthodox Church. Georgia’s post-Soviet pivot to the West, however imperfect, is driven by a widely shared conviction that the country needs alternative partners in the West.

A sociologist would add that the European vision, however naively conceived by many Georgians, runs genuinely deep, is embedded in institutions and universities and is strong in the post-Soviet younger generation. As in much of eastern Europe, social values are quite conservative but polls show a belief in democracy, a geopolitical alignment with the West and in being part of a European family. A recent poll showed that Georgians trust the EU more than they do any domestic institution. (Russia and China were at the bottom of the list.)

A conclusion from this is that, if Europe has made a mistake in Georgia, it was not (as realist and leftist critics allege) because it had hegemonic designs on the country, but because it did not respond more strongly to this societal demand and act more geopolitically, when times were more favourable, by, for example, making more ambitious economic and infrastructure investments to bind Georgia closer to Europe.

If Western choices are invidious, a fourth-term Georgian Dream administration also has unenviable choices ahead.

The ruling party lacks an international mandate, while their domestic mandate is not only disputed but, such as it is, defined by what they are against (Western liberal values, LGBTQ rights, the UNM, ‘the global war party’), rather than what they are for. There is no obvious programme for how to govern for the next four years. The economy has had a boost since 2002 from an influx of Russian money and Russian skilled workers, but this has benefited business elites more than ordinary Georgians. The National Bank was selling reserves heavily in October.

Internationally, Georgian ‘swing geopolitics’ could end up being an oscillation in empty air, in which they have lost friends in the EU without gaining any new reliable partners – an ‘illiberal axis’ of sovereign nationalist states is after all something of a contradiction in terms. The Hungary model is hedged by membership in the EU, while another non-aligned country, Azerbaijan, is also a poor model: unlike Georgia, Azerbaijan can protect its sovereignty thanks to hydrocarbon wealth, the strongest military in the region and a strong alliance with Turkey.

Beijing, with whom Georgian Dream signed a strategic partnership agreement in 2023, could also be a hazardous bet. Seeking alternative funding and loans from China could land the Georgian government in the kind of debt trap many African countries now have with China, while alienating their would-be far-right friends in the United States for getting too close to Beijing.

If failures elsewhere lead the Georgian authorities to stop swinging and align more openly with Russia, different dangers await. Restoring diplomatic relations with Moscow would have big domestic consequences: there is bound to be a strong backlash to such a dramatic move from inside society and from government servants who have hitherto remained apolitical.

In other words, Georgian Dream’s illiberal gambit may eventually end up being a lose-lose strategy for the whole country, including themselves.