Georgia has crossed a Russian Rubicon

What are we seeing in Georgia? That isn’t an easy question to answer, but I think it’s the moment at which the government of a functioning democracy crosses the line to illegitimacy and autocracy.

That transition can be hard to spot in real time. Governing young states tends to get messy and even authoritarian regimes claim democratic legitimacy, including the one President Vladimir Putin has developed in Russia and President Xi Jinping’s in China. Yet at some point, those claims became transparently meaningless. That’s happening in Georgia.

It's easy enough to see when an unpopular leader, such as South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, declares martial law for no genuine reason. His Dec. 3 attempt at what amounted to a constitutional coup failed and impeachment awaits him. Yet if that’s the political equivalent of an open declaration of war, Georgia’s evolution is more akin to hybrid warfare, where the subversion of institutions and rights is more surreptitious and is conducted in their name.

A tipping point came last week when authorities in the capital Tbilisi sent masked police to raid the headquarters of opposition parties, carry off their files and arrest a party leader who had the temerity to object. Security officers also waited for political activists outside their homes and bundled them into cars, presumably for detention. These were the actions of a police state.

The government sought to justify the move by saying it had information these people were planning a violent insurrection, making the raids and arrests "preventative.” That isn’t, of course, impossible; the most developed democracies struggle with crowd control. Yet it’s also highly implausible, because of everything else the government has done before.

For one thing, it has jailed the only Georgian leader ever to acknowledge defeat in an election and hand over power in a peaceful transition — former President Mikheil Saakashvili — and seemingly thrown away the key. It also takes its orders from an unelected multibillionaire, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his money in Russia. He chairs and funds the ruling Georgian Dream party. This year, he has also adopted the Kremlin’s entire, conspiratorial, anti-Western lexicon, now keenly parroted by his government. As part of that, it’s portraying some of the largest protests the country has ever seen as the work of foreign agents and violent saboteurs.

Then there are the constitutional issues. President Salome Zourabichvili, whose role is now largely symbolic, applied for Georgia’s constitutional court to review the results of Oct. 26 parliamentary elections, based on allegations of failure to open polling stations for voters abroad, vote buying and violations of ballot secrecy. The court — with two dissenting opinions — rejected the case Dec. 3, on largely jurisdictional grounds, saying it had not looked at the substance of the evidence.

According to the official election results, Georgian Dream won the vote by 54% to 38% for the combined opposition. On Dec. 14, Zourabichvili will be up for reelection, but for the first time this won’t be decided in a popular vote, but by an electoral college. Half of the 300 electors will be members of parliament, so she’s very likely to lose. She’s said she won’t stand down because the parliament is illegitimate.

It's hard to know the truth of the fraud allegations without an independent inquiry, which has yet to take place and at this point likely never will. A nonbinding European Parliament resolution on Nov. 28 called for a rerun of the vote. In response, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze suspended EU membership talks until 2028, triggering the current mass protests.

It's here that I think the government gives away the nature of its pantomime democracy. Georgian Dream ran for reelection claiming that a Global Party of War had forced Ukraine to fight Moscow and was now trying to do the same to Georgia. The party paid lip service to their nation’s aspirations to join the EU the actual reason for which Russia turned on Ukraine in 2014 — because polls routinely show that upwards of 80% of the population say they want to do so. And yet, every move it’s made over the last year has seemed tailored to ensure that can’t happen.

The European Parliament has no sway over foreign policy, so its resolution was symbolic. Kobakhidze nevertheless used that hot air as an excuse for his very real decision to bury the wishes of his own electorate, in deference to his boss Ivanishvili and to Moscow. In his statement announcing the delay, he continued to pretend commitment to eventual goal of EU membership, which is written into the Georgian constitution, but the veil has fallen.

That’s why Georgian ambassadors are resigning their posts and the streets of cities across the country are filled night after night by young protesters, who see their hopes for the future slipping away. To dismiss these people as foreign tools or criminals as the government has done is the deepest and most cynical of insults. They are fighting to achieve what the ruling party says it also wants, but clearly does not.