Piercing rainclouds on Friday, we election monitors descended to Tbilisi past Mount Elbrus, Europe’s tallest peak, as though a spectre hung over Georgia’s capital. The South Caucasian statelet was once lauded for leading the post-Soviet space in democratic resilience, yet today it looks centrally cast in the maelstroms escalated by the invasion of Ukraine. At stake is whether Georgia clings onto the narrowing intra-West space for a democratic politics that is also interest-based and sceptical of liberal hubris. The alternative is the exclusionary ratchet claiming another Western nation.

Saturday’s result seemed as clear to us as it was intolerable to foreign newsrooms, NGOs, and chancelleries. If Western hubris goes uncooled in the heady aftermath, the revolt stoked would not just unsettle Georgia. It would signal to democrats anywhere that if their aim were to contravene liberal dogma, even the clearest win will earn them a tin-pot tyrant’s treatment, while far ghastlier rulers get off scot-free. Georgia’s quarantine would be even worse news for dissenters in the West. It would deprive them of an ally, as few exist, to reset the meaning of “Western” back to when ostracism, lawfare, and blackmail weren’t used against principled opponents.

The clouding effect in the air on Saturday, I suspect, was intentional. If not for Georgia’s tourist charms, witnessing an open process framed as a “Russian influence op” would have felt futile. From early election morning, the Western press was chattering about stuffed ballots, “reports” of vote buying, and even voters intimidated and hounded at undisclosed locales. The sense this fed was of a race run from Moscow, with readers likely assuming Kremlin discretion over the final tally. Further falsehoods depicted the FSB, Russia’s secret police, patrolling the country. The presumption that digitised vote-tallying dissuaded opposition voters who feared being blacklisted was concocted ex post out of thin air.

The build-up erupted into full-on denialism Sunday evening, when President Salome Zourabichvili called to flood the streets based on the sum total of these unsubstantiated fraud allegations. The odds of a colour revolution are rising by the minute, with her call seconded with increased furor by some in the opposition and by new countries with no previous stake in Georgia’s affairs.

Their target is the incumbent Georgian Dream. PM Kobakhidze’s party secured its fourth parliamentary majority since 2012 just as it stood accused of derailing the country’s EU accession pathway with “illiberal” legislation and seeking closer ties with Russia. In fact, no plan has existed to create such ties since the latter’s 2008 invasion of Abkhazia and South Ossetia froze bilateral diplomacy entirely. Though its rhetoric against a presumed “global war party” invited accusations of conspiracism, the party’s actual pledge was to resist Georgia becoming a “second front” in the ongoing war, while remaining committed to Euro-Atlantic integration, a telos that Georgian Dream constitutionalised in 2017. After a long saga of EU lawfare, not least around the arch-controversial “foreign agents law” tarnished as “Russian”, and a ban on LGBT content from airtime and school curricula, you could feel the onslaught about to boil over the second the election authority called 53 per cent of the vote for Georgian Dream.

Much of the opposition’s predicament is the result a self-own

The result would have proved less triggering, oddly, had the party clinched 113 seats out of 150. That “constitutional majority” would have enabled Georgian Dream to substantially neuter, or even outlaw, its main opposition, the United National Movement of former PM Saakashvili (2003-2012). Though expanded from 74 to 89, the ruling bench falls short for the “Belarus-on-the-Caucasus” headlines that would naturally follow such a move. The denialism, then, is humming overtime, while Georgian Dream prepares for a new Parliament with easier numbers up against tougher global bullying, in which it will seek to keep future EU membership open while staying war neutral and socially conservative.

Much of the opposition’s predicament is the result of a self-own. It failed to unite under a single figurehead, instead splintering into four platforms at war over personalities more than substance. Saakashvili is under house arrest for abusing the power he once held, in conditions contested at the time but that relevant bodies have since deemed fair. While in office he Putinized Georgia’s penal system and prisons, while living lavishly and controversially. The youthful voters that enthused the world when hit by water cannons while protesting the evil “Russian law”, for their part, tended to vote for inexperienced idealists. These platforms combined fell short of the 40 per cent mark, with Saakashvili’s UNM (10 per cent) losing first spot to the younger Coalition for Change (11 per cent). What would replace Georgian Dream, were a colour revolution successful, seems a more daunting question than before the vote.

The lead-up to the meltdown was thrilling to behold. Our delegation of election monitors witnessed a transparent process everywhere we went. Twitter showed the odd altercation, yet even Tbilisi’s opposition strongholds were quiet at opening and closing. Granted, several reports of vote-buying, voter intimidation and ballot stuffing have been made elsewhere, and investigations have been swiftly launched. But a partial recount appears to have confirmed the initial results.

Voters were at ease with new tech, whereby each precinct’s tallies in the decentralised whole would be scanned and sent to Tbilisi, for 90 per cent of them to be recounted by hand. With electoral trust free-falling globally, most Western countries could learn from Georgia’s electoral modernisation, which in this case sharply reduced errors seen in previous races. Yet even as it had stemmed — along with electoral rule changes — from a deal brokered by the EU’s Charles Michel in 2021, critics rushed to question the new vote-tallying system the moment results came in. 

Sharing a briefing with various pan-Western assemblies, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) was compelled to uphold the result’s validity by instead focusing its routine feedback on heightened polarisation and its effect on public trust, unaided by sour messaging on both sides. Crucial in rubber-stamping Georgian Dream’s last victory in 2020 as free and fair, it essentially gave its thumbs-up anew. Yet on Sunday most of Tbilisi’s Western diplomatic corps joined Zourabichvili in calling foul, as she spoke of an “election rigged” and a “Russian influence op” meant to “steal your vote”. The as yet unevidenced claims wouldn’t have succeeded as they have had more states acknowledged Georgia’s will. Hungary’s PM, who holds the EU Council’s rotating presidency and backs Georgian Dream’s pro-peace stance and EU accession ambitions, flew to Tbilisi Monday upon being first to recognise the result, quicker even than Georgia’s South Caucasian neighbours. Armenia and Azerbaijan have no other place to meet to hash out their own territorial quagmire than neighbouring Georgia, and thus have a stake in stability.

The successful problematising of the electoral process has already fuelled a perilous spiral that will have consequences beyond Georgia. Leaving aside accusations of thwarting “European values”, it is the “pro-Russia” label that Western “experts” should feel most ashamed of attributing to Georgian Dream. A better-read assessment of Georgia’s relationship with Moscow would account for its history, and the mandate given by the country’s overwhelmingly pro-Euro-Atlantic electorate. Nearly 90 per cent of Georgians want EU and NATO accession, yet not at the cost of impoverishment or a sense of being used as a cat’s paw by bigger players.

Georgia’s nominal support of Ukraine peeves Russia more than is admitted by the enemies of either. Yet the self-harm from whatever sanctions it could slap on its 250-times-larger neighbour — on which it depends for tourism, remittances, and food markets — would be crippling in ways that Western nations with stable borders simply can’t comprehend. Russia went unsanctioned when it invaded Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008, displacing nearly 200,000 and illegally seizing 20 per cent of Georgia’s pre-war sovereign territory — a lower share than lost by Ukraine since 2014. Then-PM Saakashvili’s move to reconquer the breakaway territories lost to separatists seems rash in retrospect, but it followed Bush Jr’s characteristically vague offer of NATO accession that year. Georgia’s brutal defeat in Europe’s first 21st century war was settled in humiliating terms by then-French President Sarkozy.

The country remains mortified by its fearsome neighbour, but also desperate to avoid a flare-up — especially if, triggered by the West, it ends up footing the bill and abandoned as a pawn. Most Georgians long for NATO membership, but few expect it would defend their borders next time, when it failed before —a lingering doubt that defeats the alliance’s very purpose, laid out in Article V.

Georgia has been prosecuting the evasion of anti-Russian sanctions since the war more thoroughly than many a Western nation, yet arms deliveries through its territory are a non-starter for Tbilisi. That step would institute a “second front”, the government reasons. Instead, non-confrontational approaches to Russia, even with diplomacy confined to backchannels, is actually Georgian Dream’s bet to peacefully reintegrate Abkhazia and South Ossetia one day. Joining Ukraine’s war, meanwhile, would undermine development opportunities and make Georgia a flash point of a major conflict, risking yet more land loss. 

The territorial trauma from 2008 bears out in the fact that most Georgians would choose reversing it over EU membership. They similarly frame their Europhilia in utilitarian terms, even as Brussels insists on sermonising over liberal values. Georgia was only offered candidate status in December last year, a year and a half after Ukraine and Moldova, both of whom it out-performed by the bloc’s own standards. To this day it ranks even higher than some member states in those criteria, but knows that double standards would follow it into the bloc, where it would join rule-of-law renegades under the cudgel of punitive conditionalities and even greater expectations of anti-Russia sanctions.

This sense of global demands being mismatched with local concerns — Georgia remains 15 per cent poor — is exemplified by the NGO debate. Georgian Dream was well on its way to meeting the requirements laid out for EU accession in mid-2023, having also conceded to the opposition the aforementioned constitutional changes to electoral rules that favoured them on Saturday, such as replacing the share of first-past-the-post constituencies with a fully proportional map. The new 5 per cent threshold for entering parliament was said to pull in the opposite way, yet it could have also triggered an odds-enhancing union in the opposition, which chose petty infighting instead. Things pointed to a consensus, in short — but then came the “foreign agents law”.

The risk of the brewing colour revolution turning into something darker presents a chance for cooler heads to prevail

This law requires NGOs with over 20 per cent of foreign funding to register as “bearing the interests of a foreign power”. Certainly, a lot of Georgians protested — but how representative were they? Hardly more than a narrow professional cadre of mobile managerialists have been benefiting from the billions pouring in from foreign philanthropists. Many of these non-profits were called in to fill the vacuum left by a retreating state under 1990s neoliberalism, but started providing slanted coverage of Georgia to the world. When Kobakhidze offered a Western-style model of public grants to substitute for the firehose of foreign money felt to ignore Georgia’s real problems, only 450 of several thousand NGOs accepted it. The vast majority called it “bribery”, and have since been in contempt of law, accelerating their calls to topple Georgian Dream. Yet the law has thus far disappointed those expecting harassment.

The risk of the brewing colour revolution turning into something darker presents a chance for cooler heads to prevail. Georgia’s heightened polarisation — and both sides’ reduced tolerance of defeat — is actually a West-converging trend. Furthermore, Georgia’s stubborn neutrality in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine provides more, not less, of a motive to respect the verdict. It is to its avoidance of the gyre of escalation that Georgian Dream owes its victory, and the attempts to nullify the result could only sour Georgians further on the West. If one of the most pro-Western governments keeps backing policies that have put EU accession on the line, then instead of pushing it away and into Russia’s hands, the West should buy a mirror. Dissenters inside it, meanwhile, should redouble efforts to change Europe — and to secure Georgia’s future within it.