Last week, the streets of Tbilisi fell into anarchy. Outside the parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue, countless tear gas canisters fell from the sky. Riot police dispersed crowds with water cannons and pepper spray, street windows were smashed, people threw bottles and bricks, and cars were overturned and burned.
Nationwide protests began erupting on March 7 after the ruling Georgian Dream Party began pushing for a controversial draft law. The draft, if successfully passed, would require independent media and civil society organizations that receive more than 20 percent of funding from abroad to register as "foreign agents." By 9 March, the Georgian government had made concessions. Some 130 people arrested during the protests were quickly released and an emergency parliamentary session was hastily scheduled on March 10 to veto the bill.
For outside observers, the stunning shift in Georgia's Dream Party's stance could mark the end of a seemingly confusing event in the country's politics. In reality, the impact of this event may be far from over.
Demonstrators in Georgia called the bill "Putin's Law," a counterpart to a 2012 Moscow bill used to crack down on dissent. Hubertus Jahn, a professor of Russian history at the University of Cambridge, said: "It is the historical trajectory of these laws that makes them extremely terrifying, this law has had a huge impact in Russia, and soon there will be no NGOs in Russia to function, and once these organizations are gradually shut down, an open civil society will cease to exist." Since Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has imposed so many restrictions on those considered "foreign agents" that now almost all opposition voices are in prison, driven underground, or driven abroad.
"The Georgian Dream Party's bill reflects their political hatred and unacceptable dissent," Gia Pailodze, a 66-year-old filmmaker, told reporters during a demonstration in Tbilisi last week. Many Western commentators see the protests as while the Georgian government sympathizes with Russia, the Georgian people believe their future is in Europe.
The Russian side denies that the Georgian protests have anything to do with Russia and claims that, as Georgia Dream did, the draft bill is based on a U.S. law of the 2030s that requires lobbyists and advocates of foreign governments, organizations, and individuals to disclose their related activities and remuneration to the U.S. Department of Justice.
After the bill was revoked, Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, noted on the Telegram channel that "Georgia lost the opportunity to have its own sovereignty." He claimed that street protests in Georgia were a product of Washington's "soft power" rather than a healthy civil voice.
Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, also blamed the United States. He said Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, who expressed support for the protesters, was "speaking to Georgians from the United States." Zulabichvili was on his way to New York for the UN summit, and Peskov said of the United States that "some people's visible hands are trying to join the anti-Russian character in it." He also referred to "provocations" and "focused concerns" in the Kremlin.
Others don't have as much diplomatic rhetoric.
The Twitter account of the "Russian Foreign Ministry in Crimea," which Russia has created in the annexed region, is labeled as a Russian government organization and threatens protesters demanding the resignation of the Georgian government. "We recommend," the tweet read, "to take a good look back at what happened in Ukraine in 2014 and what it ultimately led to!" Since 2008, Russia has consolidated its grip on Georgian territories in the Caucasus, including South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which account for more than 20 percent of Georgia's land. According to some reports, protests over the bill led Russian security forces in the occupied areas to conduct a number of military exercises. And as an example of the tense situation, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan's remarks easily topped the hot search charts, calling for a nuclear strike on Georgia.
In the weeks leading up to the protests in Georgia, Georgia's critics pointed out that the draft law, called the Foreign Influence Transparency Act, was just the latest evidence of a growing tilt toward authoritarianism in a country once hailed as "a beacon of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism," in the words of one former U.S. diplomat. However, a national security leak in 2021 appeared to reveal mass surveillance of voices critical of the government. Nika Gvaramia, a prominent journalist critical of the government, was sentenced to prison last year, and his supporters, human rights groups such as Amnesty International and even the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi say the charges appear to be motivated more by political revenge than justice.
But to really understand how a country still under Russian occupation has come to the point of trying to implement analogues of Russian law, our focus is to grasp the geopolitics that are at work and at the same time worrying. When the Georgian Dream Party came to power in 2012, its number one task was to maintain peace and stability after a disastrous war with Russia in 2008. In carrying out this task, Georgia has long sought to forge an unusually delicate line between deepening ties with its historical allies of the West and avoiding any provocations against Putin's regime.
With last year's full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, this delicate balancing act became more difficult, if not impossible, as Western countries called on Georgia to join sanctions against Russia and provide material support to the Ukrainian army. The Georgian Dream Party rejected these calls and instead launched unprecedented verbal attacks on the United States and the European Union. By contrast, the Georgian government's relationship with Putin's regime has only increased. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov even praised the Georgian Dream Party for not being "another stimulus" for the Kremlin's decision to remain largely neutral in the conflict.
Last week, students and artists protested "Russian law" in front of the Georgian parliament building in the capital Tbilisi
In 2022, $2.5 billion worth of business with Russian companies made Russia Georgia's second-largest trading partner after Turkey, which in turn has sparked international concerns about Georgia as likely to become a new channel for Russia to evade sanctions, while negotiations are still ongoing for the first resumption of direct flights between Moscow and Tbilisi in more than three years.
But about 85 percent of Georgia's population supports joining the European Union. Following the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the EU promised to speed up the candidature applications of Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova – but while Ukraine and Moldova were approved in June, Georgia's applications were delayed due to a manifest lack of will to implement the necessary reforms.
And in the double whammy of the anti-Western rhetoric that followed, the Foreign Agents Bill was seen as a blatant attempt by the Georgian Dream Party to undermine the country's remaining prospects for integration with the EU. Especially in view of the fact that the draft law was in fact first and foremost proposed by Popular Power, a hardline anti-American, anti-EU party, and its provisions were a clear violation of the European Charter of Human Rights, to which Georgia is a signatory.
Giorgi Zhvania, a 35-year-old IT manager who participated in the Tbilisi protests, said: "We want to live in a European-style democracy, and the new bill goes against that path." This, he said, "will divide Georgia, and that is Russia's political intention: to divide and conquer a country." One of the EU's demands for Georgia is "deoligarchization," experts say, a meaningful effort to counter the influence of vested interests on Georgia's political and public life.
It is an open secret that Bidzina Ivanishvili, billionaire founder of Georgian Dreams, is by far the richest businessman in the country, and although he officially announced his retirement from politics in 2021, it is not the first time he has declared so, and that he remains the gray leader of the party. Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, members of the European Parliament have repeatedly demanded sanctions against him, given his long-standing ties to a large Russian business interest group and he has no illusions about what "deoligarchization" means. But Julie George, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, said: "According to the original intentions of the party, the Georgian Dream Party cannot abandon Ivanishvili." As a result, she added, "the application to join the EU – not for the EU, not for the Georgian people, but for the Georgian Dream Party – ended last year." ”
Last week's protests may have succeeded in achieving the immediate demands of the people, but the government's change in attitude has not been without some noteworthy conditions. On March 10, an overwhelming majority of ruling party lawmakers did not attend and voted to reject the foreign agents law, leaving the process of repeal largely to the divided parliamentary opposition.
Referring to domestic and international coverage of the incident, the Georgian Dream Party said that "a lying machine will undoubtedly promote the bill in a negative light and mislead a part of the public". The party said it will work in the near future to clarify "what the bill was introduced for and why it is important."
And in fact, the party's chairman, Irakli Kobakhidze, was quick to heap praise on the drafters of the draft law for helping the government expose NGOs and independent media as "LGBT propagandists" bent on dragging Georgia into the war in Ukraine and returning the widely despised former government of imprisoned opposition figure Mikhail Saakashvili to power. The television station contacted him through Saakashvili's lawyer, and the former president said he had been poisoned, "kept lying in bed" and "in pain," according to Britain's Sky News network. He warned Georgians to be wary of "the vindictive mentality of the oligarchy."
It is difficult to predict what broader implications Georgia Dream might have if it chooses to continue its current trajectory. Some analysts say the message of the protests is an embrace of the European Union and the West. Georgia, on the other hand, will hold elections in 2024 with a new constitutional proportional representation electoral system designed to allow all votes to contribute to the final result.
Stephen Jones, head of the Georgia Studies Program at Harvard University, said that "after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Georgia did not establish a perfect democracy," but it somewhat protected the rights of citizens and allowed some kind of public space for discussion. He told reporters that further democratic setbacks mean that Georgia's last democratic hopes will be wiped out, "which is undoubtedly a tragedy for Georgians."
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