Georgian Opposition See Opportunity in Tbilisi Protests

Some thoughts: This is my second article in a row about the protests in Georgia. I will continue providing weekly analysis and reporting about the developments, as mainstream media aren’t covering the uprisings in Tbilisi at all. This piece will center the political opposition. I want to talk with Georgia Dream to get their perspective, but they’re not easy people to get a hold of. I’ll keep trying. And I’ll also work on interviewing the younger protesters leading the protests. For now, it’s important to see how the opposition will take advantage of these protests. 

As tens of thousands of Georgians continue to protest their ruling government’s introduction of a bill that will weaken civil society organizations, the country’s notoriously fractious opposition parties are scrambling behind the scenes to capitalize on the moment. 

Their members are also on the streets with protesters resisting the nightly crackdowns from law enforcement that end with tear gas, mass arrest and baton beatings and rubber bullets being fired at them. Opposition leaders have posted photos of themselves with injuries sustained from these attacks. Some video purportedly show men without identification mixed in with uniformed officers menacing and attacking peaceful protesters  

Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia Dream’s (GD) billionaire leader, has vowed to move forward with the bill and referred to NGOs and independent media funded by western sources as “intelligence agencies.” Western leaders have warned that Georgia risks jeopardizing its European trajectory, but GD doesn’t seem to care. The U.S. ambassador to Georgia Robin  Dunnigan said GD leadership rebuffed her request to meet with senior officials in Washington to discuss their concerns. 

But what’s key is whether the anger over the bill, which passed a second reading, will translate into votes during October’s parliamentary elections. Out of 150 seats in parliament, Georgia Dream has 84 of them and the rest are divided amongst more than a dozen or so parties. United National Movement (UNM) has 20 and the rest of the seats are divided between other parties that have five or few members; roughly ten are vacated by former MPs who vacated their seats in protest of the 2020 parliamentary elections over allegations of election rigging. 

One of those ex-MPs is Helen Khoshtaria, leader of the Droa party, who has been attending the protests daily. Her role has been to convince younger protesters who tend not to vote that new alternatives are slowly forging for them to consider in the coming months. Meanwhile, her colleagues inside of parliament are figuring out how to coalesce around a fresh message and platform that will attract voters.

“There are several configurations that we are still working on,” she told me. “We totally understand that if the government succeeds in passing the law, we'll be in full resistance. We are not sitting and waiting. We will do all we can to stop the bill. But even if it's passed, I think the fight continues and the fight is to make sure that people have a choice not to reelect Georgian Dream.”

Four opposition leaders admitted to me that they can’t win on their own. Making their chances tougher is a new rule banning political blocs, a blow to smaller parties. However, different factions are talking with each other about messaging that speak to the E.U. and NATO future that most Georgians want, but the current government is staunchly against pursuing.

“Yes we have differences, of course,” Anna Tsitlidze, a UNM party leader, told me from a hospital where she was being treated for injuries suffered while attending the protests. “But when the issue is about the European future and fighting against Ivanishvili, we all understand that this is a case when we need to be united. And the Georgian people are asking us to be united.”

A November 2023 IRI poll shows UNM would get around 14 percent of the vote if parliamentary elections were held late last year, just five points lower than GD. Moreover, their growth has remained stagnant over the years. Of all of the opposition parties, UNM has the highest negative ratings (their negatives in the IRI poll are worse than GDs!) in large part due to the lingering unpopularity of their former leader Mikheil Saakashvili whose final term as president ended with accusations of his own authoritarian tendencies and abuses of power. 

Tsitlidze acknowledges UNM isn’t popular with many voters and that their party, alone, can’t challenge GD. So that is why she’s hopeful the smaller factions will gain enough popularity to vie for seats they can’t get themselves.

“If you don't want  to vote for the United National Movement, we have no problem with that,” she said. “The most important thing is that these pro-European people choose among these pro-European small parties and vote for them. Because after Ivanishvili’s last speech, (voters)  understand that his way is not Europe. But if you don’t want to vote for UNM but you want to vote for Lelo or Droa, there are a lot of pro-European parties that need supporters. Vote for European parties, not Ivanishvili.”  

Some of the smaller parties, like Lelo, which holds two seats, are building coalitions with smaller, like-minded parties in parliament and newly-created ones to provide Georgian voters with middle options—namely between UNM and GD. Grigol Gegelia, Lelo’s Foreign Secretary, told me the more parties with a unified, EU-centric message, the better.

“That platform could actually have a very substantial level of support,” Gegelia told me. “We need to forge a greater unity, which would attract people who don't want either UNM or GD. That's a lot of people. So our ambition at Lelo is to support the creation of that kind of platform which will actually give middle Georgia, so to speak, a chance to vote. We are interested in forging a platform which will provide a new kind of hope, a new kind of vision, competence, and actually a clear way forward. So we need to show the people that you don't have to have GD and certainly the UNM can never come back as a single party to run the country, which ended in a disastrously, anti-democratic way.” 

Gegeria declined to name which parties Lelo is working with, but he said it’s a group of new parties and smaller ones currently in parliament. 

Regardless of how well these different factions come together, they will have a very steep hill to climb. If signed into law, this GD bill will require all of the NGOs and independent media to disclose their books if more than 20 percent of their budgets come from overseas funds, something critics say is an attempt from the government to pressure the very groups that ensure election integrity into non-existence, like in Russia. 

Though protesters forced the government to withdraw the bill in March of last year when it was first introduced, few doubt Georgia Dream will reverse course this time. 

Then you have For Georgia, a party led by Giorgi Gakharia, which has five seats. They’re in no hurry to work with UNM or any of the other factions. It’s not because they’re closed-minded to partnerships. As Anna Buchukuri, For Georgia’s deputy leader, explained it to me, it simply doesn’t make sense for them to join other parties and lose their own identity. 

“If our team unites, for instance, with UNM, we will simply disappear,” Buchukuri said. “Even UNM will gain nothing because, for so many years ,we were against each other and it's just not value-based unification. Yes, unification is OK only when it's value-based. But coordination is something different. Unification is another story. So we do not see any problem with communicating with anyone with the main purpose and goal of coordinating to protect, with our international partners, the upcoming 2024 elections.”

Translation: we don’t have to join each other to help ourselves electorally.

Winning, as I understand from my conversations with the opposition leaders, means Georgians voting for different E.U.--learning parties that are not GD. The more options they can provide voters, the more shots the parties have to steal seats from GD and threaten Ivanishvili’s grip on power. 

The main goal with the opposition this year is to oust GD as a collection of factions united around joining the EU. Think of it as several pillars of electoral options. The UNM voters will have their legacy western choice. Moderate, yet western-minded people have For Georgia and the third potential option is this smaller patchwork of factions like Lelo, Droa and others that are a fresh, new alternative altogether. If each of these pillars can get double digits, theoretically, that can unseat GD from forming a government. 

From there, they will figure out how to work with each other. This type of outlook from the parties is a major shift from what I witnessed in 2021, when they were fighting each other like cats and dogs. These parties have certainly matured—at least from what I can tell. They realize they’ll never win on their own, so they are dropping the populous approach in favor of plurality that will favor them all–and Georgia–in the long run. 

“In a parliamentary political arrangement, it is crucial to have enough votes to create your own government,” Buchukuri told me. “And to create your own government, obviously more than a simple majority is necessary. One thing that you need to understand when it comes to GD: as soon as Ivanishvili loses absolute power, all his MPs and his political circle will be so fragile. They'll be so fragile that (Ivanishvili) will simply not manage to maintain things. I'm sure some of them, if not most of them, will start texting with (Gakharia). I'm sure that they will.” 

When I asked her for clarification of whether For Georgia could potentially see some disgruntled GD members join their party, she simply replied, “You cannot exclude anything,” adding the GD of today isn't the party that won in 2012 and suggesting not all of its members share Ivanishvili’s Russia-centric views. 

All of the parties agree that western pressure against GD will be needed to assist the opposition, if they are to have a shot this year. But the rest is up to them. I think these parties have matured over the years in how they talk about each other. That they can clearly speak about the need to unify in messaging is a big step. They realize the one-man-show style of campaigning is over and that they’ll need to unite around shared European values rather than a single figurehead.

If these parties present as more than one option, they don’t have to be a bloc or even like each other. They just have to all love Europe. The down side to that is such an approach is relatively new for Georgian opposition groups. And this crop of factions haven’t shown they’re politically prudent and emotionally sober enough to cooperate in such a matter. It doesn’t mean they can’t. (I think they can!). We just haven’t seen a history of it and it’ll be a great testament to Georgia’s young democracy if they can pull it off. 

Then there is the energized youth protesting each night. If the factions can convert their protesting into fearless votes come October, young people could be the deciding factor in the balance of power that could swing in the opposition’s favor. 

Even if the bill is signed into law, I don’t see those young people packing up and going home. And that is a factor that may very well be what surges the opposition factions to victory–no matter how contentious they’ve been. 

“The mutual interest that we all have for the sake of the country, first of all, is to find a common language and a common way of doing things to get rid of the Russian government as soon as we can, because Georgia really cannot afford another four years of this disaster called Georgian Dream, Gegelia said.