Georgia hit the headlines in March when thousands of people took to the streets, waving EU flags and braving riot police, to protest the adoption of new legislation on “transparency of foreign influence,” otherwise known as the “foreign agents” bill. This was not an unfamiliar spectacle. Georgia is known for its revolutionary upheavals and street protests in response to government excesses. This time, following a traditional pattern, survival instinct kicked in for the ruling party, Georgian Dream, which voted down the controversial bill in the second reading under the dual pressure of domestic outrage and international criticism. The EU’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell, issued a starkly worded statement warning the Georgian authorities that the bill was incompatible with EU values and standards and that its enactment would have serious repercussions for EU-Georgian relations.
As the dust settles, it is worth reflecting on the state of Georgian democracy, the political context in which the recent events took place, and the efficacy of the EU’s efforts at promoting democratic consolidation in the country. Georgian Dream’s attempt at ramming through the foreign agents bill, which was modeled on Russia’s similar legislation, and the popular mobilization against it under the banner of the EU unfolded against the background of war in Ukraine and Russia’s confrontation with the West. In this context, Georgia is a battleground between Western liberalism and Russian populist conservatism and between democracy, however rudimentary, and untrammeled authoritarianism.
In Central and Eastern Europe, experience shows that democratization has better chances where linkages to the West are strong and ideological alternatives, such as Russian-style “managed democracy” or authoritarianism, are weak. Therefore, the EU should respond to the democratic backsliding in Georgia more quickly and effectively by encouraging a substantive democratization based on power sharing and direct participation.
In countries like Georgia, electoral representative democracy is not enough when the political playing field is uneven and a single party captures the state institutions. What is more, general calls by the EU and other international actors for depolarization may be used by authoritarian rulers as an excuse to crack down on dissent and fundamental freedoms. Many have speculated that the foreign agents bill was intended by the government to derail Georgia’s EU accession prospects. Whether true or not, continuing to leave Georgia without membership candidate status can be a gift instead of a punishment to a regime that may not be keen on the reforms needed for EU accession but does not say so openly for fear of the public reaction. In the recent episode of the foreign agents bill, Georgian democracy and the EU prevailed. But the battle is far from over.
Revolutionary Democracy
There is a recurring pattern in Georgian politics: a party sweeps to power on a wave of revolutionary upheaval, euphoric optimism, and the promise of change. It gains an outright majority in parliament with a popular mandate to undertake reforms. But, by the end of its first term, power corrupts the party, politics become polarized, and the space for democratic contestation narrows. If anything changes in this pattern, it is that each new set of rulers is more sophisticated than the previous one at subverting democracy. They more effectively translate a popular mandate into a tyranny of the majority, fostering a political culture in which compromise is a sign of weakness and power is monopolized rather than shared. One consequence is that Georgia’s political parties—vital institutions to a functioning democracy—have remained weak, clinging to power as they cling to life. In the thirty-year history of independent Georgia, no party has lost power and later regained it through elections.
If Georgia still has a semblance of democracy, it is thanks to popular resistance to authoritarianism and the spirit of defiance that was vividly manifested in March. Popular protest is an antidote to political apathy, but, more important, it is a response to the blocked arteries of public institutions. When institutional channels for voicing dissent or achieving change are closed, mass protest is the only available form of civil engagement. Georgians have some practice in this. Through repeated waves of protests since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the public has developed a democratic consciousness beyond that of the political elites. “I cannot believe,” read the English-language placard of one protester, “that I am still protesting this shit.”
When democracy is the only game in town, according to Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, one can speak of democratic consolidation. In the case of Georgia, democracy needs to be constantly defended against, and at times rescued from, the political establishment. Institutions are weak, checks and balances malfunction, the judiciary and civil service are subject to political interference. Elections are also skewed heavily in favor of incumbents. As the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights has repeatedly emphasized, the line between the state and the ruling party is blurred. Georgia can best be described as a revolutionary democracy, where revolution signifies a popular uprising resulting in radical change but not necessarily a complete system collapse. In this context, the primary check on state power is the street, underpinned by opposition media and civil society.
These last two pillars of revolutionary democracy push critical opinions into the public domain and can mobilize citizens. No doubt that is why Georgian Dream’s foreign agents bill targeted them. Under its provisions, any organization receiving more than 20 percent of its funding from abroad, including for technical assistance or academic research, such as in the case of the EU’s Horizon Europe funds, would have had to register as an agent of foreign influence. Refusal to do so would incur a hefty fine and ultimately a prison sentence. Organizations thus attacked would have become entangled in lengthy and expensive appeals, while under a cloud of suspicion conjured up by government-controlled media to the effect that they promote anti-Georgian interests. This would have considerably restricted Georgia’s political, professional, and societal linkages to the West and constrained any democracy promotion efforts in the country by outside actors.
As Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have observed, cultural and media ties, academic exchanges, elite networks, and direct support from Western governments stimulate democratization by boosting local demand for democracy and increasing the domestic costs of authoritarianism. Thus, rulers with authoritarian proclivities try to restrict the Western connections of domestic constituencies or discredit them by questioning their national loyalty. In language with strikingly Orwellian overtones, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said on March 7 that certain organizations receiving funding from abroad foster polarization and aim to destabilize Georgia. He argued that foreign agents laws exist in other countries and that Georgia was fully in its right to act as a sovereign state. “The future of our country does not belong and will no longer belong to foreign agents or servants of foreign countries,” he said, “it belongs to patriots.”
By its nature, revolutionary democracy is vulnerable to populism. This is perhaps why almost all regimes that have been swept to power on a wave of popular upheaval resort to populism to legitimize and extend their reign. The radicalism of their most loyal supporters renders them susceptible to populist rhetoric. In promoting the foreign agents bill, Georgian Dream and its radical offshoot, the People’s Power movement, exhibited ideological affinity with the populist conservatism championed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. They combined anti-gay, anti-liberal, and toxic-masculinity themes with an emphasis on traditional values and the moral authority of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Government-controlled media warned of grand conspiracies orchestrated from outside of the country and a devious plot by the U.S.-led institutional West to drag Georgia into the war in Ukraine, and they played up the sovereign national right to disregard international opinion.
A War of Values
While conservatism and nationalism are standard fare in Georgia, the explicitly anti-Western and Euroskeptic overtones adopted by their latest propagators are new. In contrast to Russia, there is no tradition of anti-Westernism in Georgia. Until recently, no significant political party had adopted it. Emphasizing independence and dignity, the government campaign in favor of the foreign agents bill implied that EU membership conditionality comprised an insult to Georgians. Kakha Kaladze, the general secretary of Georgian Dream, declared: “I know European values, but when they tell you that you must be a slave, it is unacceptable.” Adopting elements of Putinist rhetoric, Garibashvili described the protesters as anarchists, satanists, and servants of foreign countries [read: the West], all trying to overthrow a legitimate government. “They all will be punished in accordance with the law,” he threatened.
Russia weighed in on the side of the government. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asserted that the protests were orchestrated from abroad and aimed to change power by using violence. After Georgian Dream withdrew the bill, Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of Russia’s State Duma, lamented that Georgia had lost its “chance of sovereignty.” Various Russian officials had earlier complimented the Georgian authorities for standing up to Western pressure and for thwarting a Western-Ukrainian conspiracy to drag Georgia into the war and open a second front against Russia. Chief Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan ironically remarked that Georgians are behaving so well that next year they may even attend May 9 parade.
The ideological dimension of Russia’s confrontation with the West must not be ignored. Putin has declared that Russia is fighting not only a political war but also a cultural one to stop the imposition of neoliberal views by Western states. He seeks alliances with conservative and populist forces around the globe in defense of an alternative and, in his view, culturally superior set of moral and religious values. He has found support from people in Hungary and Serbia and among many right-wing politicians in the West. In Georgia, Russia’s ideological shadow has grown steadily in recent years. Vociferously conservative groups in Georgia, such as Alt-Info and Conservative Movement, have emerged and found strong allies, especially in People’s Power and the ruling party. The March protests pushed these groups to temporary retreat, but the continued bellicose rhetoric by Georgian Dream and government officials signals that they do not consider themselves defeated.
After years of EU democracy promotion and approximation with EU law, one of the most pro-Western countries in the Eastern Partnership seems to be drifting into Russia’s ideological camp. This would be a significant loss for the West and a challenge for the newly geopolitically aware EU. However, polls in Georgia still show very strong popular support for European integration, pointing to the limits of Russian soft power in the country. The March protests played out under the EU banner, a powerful symbol that signals an advantage for the EU in the Georgian theater of the war of values. The challenge is to leverage this advantage and bolster Georgian democracy against authoritarian rivals.
The first test will come when the European Council deliberates in December about granting Georgia EU candidate status. The council may wish to punish the government by continuing to withhold this until further progress is achieved. But this risks scoring an own-goal in the current context of geopolitical and ideological competition. Leaving Georgia behind would disappoint its public and allow Euroskeptics inside and outside the government to gain politically with rhetoric of rejection and humiliation. The intended punishment could turn into a gift for antidemocratic and populist forces, leaving the EU with reduced leverage. The European Council should consider alternatives, such as individual sanctions, that would send a clear message to Georgia’s ruling party without jeopardizing the EU’s overall goal.
From Revolutionary to Consensual and Open Democracy
Revolutionary democracy in Georgia has contributed to an extreme form of majoritarianism. The mass politics of the street, with peaceful demonstrations and riots as variants, has on more than one occasion saved the country’s democracy, but it has also contributed to exclusionary practices and a high concentration of power. Losing power is tantamount to political banishment and even leads to legal persecution. A majoritarian model of democratic governance, combined with a winner-takes-all political culture, encourages authoritarian modes of action, undermines accountability, breeds corruption, and denies representation to large segments of the population. Polarization has become a constant of Georgian politics. It is not only about bickering political parties; it is underpinned by economic exclusion, inequality, and urban-rural differences in development.
When the European Council granted Georgia a European perspective last year, it highlighted the country’s weaknesses when it comes to accountability, transparency, participation, and institutional independence, most notably of the judiciary. And, understanding that political polarization impinged on the quality of democracy, it also recommended that the problem be tackled as a matter of top priority. How the European Council would measure progress or regression and how Georgia might fulfill the recommendation about polarization was not specified. It did, however, refer to the agreement brokered by European Council President Charles Michel between Georgia’s government and opposition in April 2021. This endorsed a fully proportional system for elections to the Parliament, a 2 percent threshold for a party to gain seats, and opposition members chairing at least five parliamentary committees and leading at least one parliamentary delegation. The government signed the agreement but later abandoned it, while the main opposition party, the United National Movement, rejected it from the outset.
Polarization is easily diagnosed, but depolarization is hard to define, let alone accomplish. And, however defined, depolarization does not guarantee that the quality of democracy will improve. Indeed, depolarization can also be achieved through the destruction of the opposition or through the consolidation of autocracy at the expense of civil society. This seems to be the solution preferred by the Georgian authorities, who have claimed that “radical opposition groupings” and EU-funded nongovernmental organizations must be yanked into line because they contribute to polarization and impede the fulfillment of the EU’s conditionality. According to Irakli Kobakhidze, chairman of Georgian Dream, “the European Union is asking for depolarization with one hand and financing polarization with the other hand.”
Clarification and greater specificity in the formulation of EU conditionality are much needed. Reducing polarization by any means is unlikely to improve the quality of democracy. Structural, institutional reforms aimed at substantive and sustainable democratization must address the systemic faults that led to polarization in the first place. The April 2021 agreement contains elements of such reforms. It would establish a degree of power-sharing and proportional representation, as well as inclusive processes of decisionmaking based on cross-party dialogue and public consultation. These concrete recommendations that are specific to the Georgian context should have been transposed into the conditionality adopted subsequently by the European Council.
Georgia needs to replace its purely majoritarian system of governance and its adversarial political culture with institutionalized power-sharing and more consensual decisionmaking. The EU closely follows principles of consensus democracy in its supranational decisionmaking and that model is also dominant among its member states. Characterized by a diffusion of power, consensus democracy is designed not to create clear winners but rather to avoid creating clear losers. To quote Luuk van Middelaar, a leading scholar of the EU: “We Europeans do not play to win but to minimize losses.” If Georgia is to join the EU, then it too must embrace its own form of consensual democracy.
This may not be sufficient, however. Mechanisms for direct citizen participation are needed to balance the corporatist nature of the consensus model. The Georgian experience shows that weak political parties with limited staying power are not effective channels for citizen participation. There are no institutional mechanisms for citizens to make their voices heard between elections—their only option is to take to the streets when a party in power changes direction or falls short on its promises. Innovative approaches are needed to make Georgian democracy more open and engage citizens directly at the municipal or national levels. Several countries have tried models such as national citizens’ assemblies, councils, or dialogues. Georgia too experimented with direct participatory democracy during the First Republic in 1918–1921, instituting local assemblies known as eroba. Such innovation cannot be imposed from outside, but Georgia’s partners, including the EU, could encourage this by refusing to accept formal electoral parliamentarism over substantive democratization. A good place to start would be to retain the position of a popularly elected president with a nonpartisan affiliation. Constitutional changes that take effect in 2024 envisage the president to be elected by Parliament, diminishing the possibility for him or her to act independently.
Breaking the Pattern
Despite the sense of déjà vu evoked by the March events, there were new elements. First, the heroic effort to stop the foreign agents bill was led by the people, not by politicians. Spontaneous, horizontal, and decentralized, the wave of protests was not co-opted or hijacked for parties’ political interests. Second, the wave did not escalate into an attempt to bring down the government. Once the ruling coalition yielded by voting down the bill on its second reading, the protests ended. Perhaps Georgia can break out of its familiar revolutionary pattern as the public begins to reject the old style of politics. Hope for change can be glimpsed here, and the challenge is to coax it out of the streets and into free and fair elections.
Another novelty was the government’s ideological and political pivot away from the West. Georgian Dream is the first ruling party in recent history to depart from Georgia’s pro-Western and pro-European trajectory. To be sure, at the level of declared priorities, not much has changed. In a country where support for European integration is above 80 percent, jettisoning this would be a shortcut to revolution. However, Georgian Dream’s growing attacks against the country’s Western partners, the introduction of the foreign agents bill, and the rhetoric surrounding it make the democratic and pro-European facade of the ruling party difficult to sustain. And, now that Georgian Dream has suffered a moral and political blow at home and abroad, a traditional battle for its political survival will begin in earnest as the 2024 elections approach.
If Georgia is to transition from revolutionary to institutional democracy, its international partners—the EU, in particular—must promote electoral reforms that level the playing field and make voting meaningful. The EU has a unique power to nudge the country away from its majoritarian governance and zero-sum political culture. EU conditionality will work best when it is concrete, context-specific, and coincides with public expectations. Georgia will benefit from a turn to a more equitable distribution of political gains and losses, as well as from the strengthening of institutional safeguards that buttress democracy against the personalization of politics. Moreover, Georgian democracy today is a battleground in the war of values between Russia and the West that must be won.
Natalie Sabanadze is a Cyrus Vance Visiting Professor in international relations at Mount Holyoke College and a former Georgian ambassador to the European Union, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
This article is part of the European Democracy Hub initiative run by Carnegie Europe and the European Partnership for Democracy.
