It’s a democratic stress test. Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party declared victory following Saturday’s pivotal vote, but opposition parties immediately challenged the outcome amid many reports of intimidation and some exit polls showing the opposition ahead. Refusing to recognize the official results and dismissing the contest as a “Russian special operation,” pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili called on Georgians to come out in protest on Monday. Will Georgian Dream consolidate power and pull Georgia further toward Russia and away from Western institutions? What’s next for the opposition? How should the United States and the European Union (EU) respond? We polled our experts for their thoughts.
Click to jump to an expert analysis:
Daniel Fried: The US and EU need a plan for Georgian government repression
Leslie Shedd: As an election monitor, I saw Georgian Dream’s intimidation tactics up close
Maia Nikoladze: The international community must question the legitimacy of this election
Andrew D’Anieri: In the election’s aftermath, Georgians’ civil liberties are at stake
The US and EU need a plan for Georgian government repression
Georgia’s authoritarian-minded ruling party Georgian Dream, led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, has dubiously claimed victory in the country’s October 26 parliamentary elections, while the pro-democracy opposition has asserted fraud and the election-monitoring mission of the respected Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has cited extensive efforts to intimidate voters and manipulate the results. Tensions in the country are high, as are the chances of government repression to retain power.
Credible exit polls published on October 26 (from Mtavari and Formula TV) gave Georgian Dream 41 percent and 42 percent percent of the vote, respectively. The official Georgian Central Election Commission announced on October 26 that Georgian Dream had won with about 54 percent, at odds with this credible exit polling.
The elections occurred against a background of mounting authoritarian threats and actions by the Georgian government, including threats to outlaw opposition parties and a law putting pressure on civil-society groups that receive foreign funding.
Georgians have consistently and over many years expressed their desire to integrate with Europe and NATO. Russia has for years sought to undermine this option, using economic pressure, disinformation, and, in 2008, war. Russian propagandists have boasted that the October 26 elections marked a defeat for Western efforts to engineer “regime change” in Georgia.
Georgia’s President Salome Zourabichvili, who has publicly supported the democratic opposition, condemned the elections on October 27, characterizing the official results as illegitimate and the product of Russian efforts to subordinate the country. She announced a public demonstration for the evening of October 28.
The Georgian government is likely to press ahead with its claims of victory. The opposition demonstration on Monday is likely to be huge. Violence, instigated by the authorities directly or through surrogates, could ensue.
The United States and Europe (not counting Hungary’s pro-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who congratulated Georgian Dream even before the government announced the results and may visit Tbilisi on Monday) face a crucial set of decisions. The West must decide how to characterize these patently bad elections, how to respond to the ruling party’s repression (including the potential for a Belarus- or Venezuela-style scenario of retaining power through force), and how to support the Georgian people in both the immediate period ahead and the longer term.
The United States has reportedly prepared sanctions against Georgian leaders, including Ivanishvili, which it will probably employ in the event of government-instigated violence or the government remaining committed to election fraud. The key variable will be whether Georgian society has the determination to resist, on a sustained basis, the imposition of authoritarian rule.
—Daniel Fried is the Weiser Family distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former US assistant secretary of state for Europe.
As an election monitor, I saw Georgian Dream’s intimidation tactics up close
I traveled to Georgia to serve as one of the International Republican Institute’s short-term observers for the country’s parliamentary elections. As I witnessed first-hand, fears that the ruling party, Georgian Dream, would use aggressive and illegal tactics to secure a victory were realized.
Leading up to the election, there was a systemic and pervasive intimidation campaign. One of the most common stories I heard was employers forcing employees to turn over their IDs to either prevent them from voting or so those IDs could be used to commit voter fraud.
On Election Day, rules limiting campaign materials and campaigning near polling stations were unabashedly ignored. The most glaring violation I saw was in the town of Tkibuli, where a large screen displayed a video of the Tbilisi mayor, a Georgian Dream member, giving a speech, his voice ringing out over the city’s loudspeaker system. In addition, at most of the polling stations I visited, groups of people hovered outside watching voters come and go, creating an air of surveillance. They were often large, intimidating-looking men, in groups of three or four, not talking but simply watching.
A video plays of the Tbilisi mayor, a prominent Georgian Dream politician, outside a polling place in Tkibuli, with sound playing over city speakers. Photo by Leslie Shedd.We also witnessed the activities of what appeared to be fake observer organizations deployed to “monitor” the elections. In the small town of Satsire, I met a woman working for one roughly translated as the “Georgia Lawyers Barristers International Organization.” For an hour and a half, we observed her approaching voters and walking them to the side of an adjacent building where she couldn’t be seen. When we asked her what she was doing, she hurriedly walked away while a different man who had also been “monitoring” the station demanded we leave. Worse, inside every single station I visited I witnessed a small video camera pointed at the voting booths or at the ballot boxes. I was told they were set up by Georgian Dream or election officials, purportedly for security and to prevent ballot stuffing.
This all sent a very clear message: We are watching.
—Leslie Shedd is a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and the president of Rising Communications.
This flawed election was just the opening bell in the opposition’s fight against Russian influence
The battle for Georgian democracy is now headed for the streets, which is exactly where most observers have long expected it to end up. After an election marred by what international observers called vote buying, double voting, and voter intimidation, the ruling Georgia Dream party’s claim to have won a parliamentary majority lacks any legitimacy. In fact, it is absurd. Moreover, Zourabichvili’s refusal to recognize the result, and her call for street protests, fully and firmly aligns the largely ceremonial presidency, the only institution of the Georgian state that has not been captured by Russia, with Georgia’s pro-Western opposition.
The battle lines are drawn. So what happens next? If Zourabichvili’s allegation that Georgia is the victim of a Russian special operation is correct—and few serious observers of the region doubt that this is the case—it stands to reason that the Kremlin and its Georgian proxies have a plan for the day after, as well.
Georgia’s 2024 parliamentary election has entered its “Maidan” phase. There are three possible outcomes: This could lead to a redux of Georgia’s 2003 peaceful Rose Revolution in which street protests ousted a corrupt and authoritarian government. It could lead to a violent crackdown and suppression of the democratic opposition, with covert Russian assistance, as was the case in Belarus in 2020. Or it could provide the pretext for direct Russian intervention, as in Ukraine in 2014. More than two decades after Georgian civil society came of age in the Rose Revolution, the country is headed for another decisive round. This weekend’s deeply flawed election was just the opening bell.
—Brian Whitmore is a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, an assistant professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arlington, and a founder and host of the Power Vertical Podcast.
The international community must question the legitimacy of this election
Georgia’s Central Election Commission (CEC), a government agency, reported that the ruling Georgian Dream has received about 54 percent of the votes so far. Opposition leaders have expressed concerns that CEC could be under pressure from the ruling party during these pivotal elections. Now CEC is under scrutiny from the public because of the widespread violations that took place in voting districts outside of big cities in Georgia, which have cast doubt on the legitimacy of these elections.
It is indeed suspicious that in a country where 79 percent of the population supports EU membership, 54 percent would vote for a party that has been driving a wedge between Georgia and its Western partners, most recently by adopting the controversial foreign-agent law and offshore law.
Before accepting the highly contested election results, the international community should question the legitimacy of the elections.
Violations such as ballot stuffing and voter intimidation appear to have had what one watchdog group called “a significant impact on the election results.” Both Transparency International and the International Society for Fair Elections and Monitoring have reported that 10 percent or more of the votes were impacted by “systemic fraud” and “widespread rigging.”
As the Georgian public and international observers navigate the challenging process to ensure that the Georgian people’s votes are accurately counted, Western policymakers should keep two things in mind:
1. The Georgian people are doing all they can to keep the country on a Western course, including by voting and volunteering to observe the elections, but they are not on a level playing field.
2. Pushing Georgia away from the West will only benefit the Russia-China-Iran axis, which could turn Georgia into an economic black hole if the Georgian government supports the evasion of sanctions and export controls.
—Maia Nikoladze is an associate director at the Economic Statecraft Initiative within the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center.
The elections were marred by intimidation and surveillance. Zourabichvili is right not to recognize them.
The official CEC results of the Georgian parliamentary elections have raised significant concerns regarding the integrity of the electoral process.
As Georgian domestic observation organizations and international observers have noted, the elections were marred by manipulation of the results through the strategic use of intimidation, surveillance, and targeted interventions in vulnerable areas of the voting system. It strains credulity to believe that the Georgian Dream party would receive its highest numbers since the 2012 election after massive protests this spring over its foreign-agent law and amid high voter turnout.
Eoghan Murphy, head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) ODIHR election-observation mission, concluded that the parliamentary elections were not “in line with international democratic principles.” Considering the typically restrained standards of the OSCE’s commentary on elections, the ODIHR statement was remarkably critical for a diplomatic organization and outlined evidence that supports many of the claims made by national organizations and international observers.
I echo Zourabichvili’s assertion that the elections were a “Russian special operation,” and she is right not to recognize the results. The people of Georgia deserve free and fair elections that are not marked by the kinds of irregularities that both national and international observers observed on Saturday.
—Laura Linderman is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and a senior fellow and program manager at the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the American Foreign Policy Council.
In the election’s aftermath, Georgians’ civil liberties are at stake
This weekend’s parliamentary elections in Georgia went largely according to the grim forecasts of many experts. The ruling Georgian Dream party appears to have cheated, mainly through widespread voter intimidation, particularly in small cities and rural areas. The Georgian Dream-friendly electoral commission declared the ruling party the victor, opposition voters and parties credibly alleged electoral fraud, and Tbilisi looks set for mass street protests Monday evening. Things could get ugly if the government deploys the new crowd-control materiel it has bragged about or if it deploys thugs to beat up protesters as it did in May.
At stake in the aftermath of this disputed election is nothing less than Georgians’ civil liberties. Egged on by Ivanishvili, Georgian Dream has already passed laws to harass civil-society organizations and to largely criminalize homosexuality, both of which the party could use to stifle dissent and jail political opponents if it remains in power. Georgian Dream’s “foreign-agent law” and “LGBTQI+ propaganda law” are lifted directly from the Russian playbook. But the ruling party won’t stop there. Its leaders have pledged to pass legislation to ban opposition political parties and codify a Belarus-style one-party autocracy. Georgian Dream has so far made good on its goals of limiting the freedoms of its citizens. We should believe party leaders when they say this is just the beginning.
The United States should continue to support Georgians’ right to self-determination and free and fair elections. More importantly, the Biden administration should have a significant policy response ready should Georgian authorities resort to further violence against protesters or political opponents.
—Andrew D’Anieri is a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.
Further reading
Thu, Oct 24, 2024
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Image: Supporters of the Georgian Dream party wave Georgian flags and the party’s flags from cars after the announcement of exit poll results in parliamentary elections, in Tbilisi, Georgia October 26, 2024. REUTERS/Zurab Javakhadze