Lie is truth, friend is enemy as Georgian Dream digs in with election campaign

After the adoption of Russian-style foreign agents law, the county’s ruling Georgian Dream party, led by oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, launched its election campaign with conspiracies, sowing discord, and detachment from reality.

Tbilisi is gearing up for the decisive elections on 26 October amid risks that may put the nail in the coffin of the nation’s democratic and Euro-Atlantic future, given the ruling party’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies combined with a pro-Russian turn.

The Georgian Dream is starting the campaign with a halted EU accession process, sanctions, frozen Western support, and closer ties with Russia and China, while leveraging conspiracies, disinformation campaigns, repression, and fear.

It was since Russia’s war in Ukraine, that Georgia’s ruling party has openly become increasingly anti-Western, harnessing disinformation against Western strategic partners, accusing them of attempting to drag the country into the war and open the so-called ‘second front’ in Georgia.

This was accompanied by Georgian Dream’s accusations that Western powers supported coup d’etat attempts, directly pointing at their government agencies.

This, however, was lifted to a whole new level when the party first introduced Russia-inspired law on foreign agents in March of 2023.

The targeting of Western partners and efforts to discredit them, along with the introduction of the bill, was followed by overt attempts to suppress democratic forces and all critical voices in Georgia.

This extended beyond repressive punitive practices and smear and hate campaigns leveraged over the years, to setting a precedent for the legalisation of repression, crackdown on party critics and making them unable to function:

“If [the NGOs] do not obey [the foreign agents law], the fines will be imposed, then their assets will be frozen. They will not be able to function, nor will they be able to receive funds”, Georgian Dream Party Secretary Kahkha Kaladze told the media a week after the final adoption of the law.

As the country gets closer to the fateful elections, with civil resistance and opposition set out the choice the nation needs to make between “Europe [EU] and Russia”, Georgian Dream, having fed war fears, chose to make the elections a choice between “War and Peace”:

“It is a referendum between war and peace, between slavery and dignity, between returning to the dark past and moving forward, between total lack of perspective and Georgia’s European perspective”, Ivanishvili said at the campaign launch speech in Tbilisi.

Global War Party narrative

The ‘Global War Party’ narrative first resurfaced at the beginning of 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mamuka Mdinaradze, the parliamentary leader of the ruling Georgian Dream party, has been one of the most vocal speakers along with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, consistently linking the critics of Georgia’s reaction to the war to the “war party”.

Mdinaradze first attributed this title to the ruling party’s biggest opponent, the United National Movement (UNM), which is led by former president Mikheil Saakashvili and was previously in power.

Since Georgian Dream tends to link its critics to the UNM to discredit them, the “war party” became a synonym of a “collective UNM”, which allowed government propaganda the flexibility to insert undesired powers and individuals under the same warmongering umbrella.

This pool of persons and powers under this framework has extended to all Georgian opposition parties, even EU and EU officials, as well as Georgian civil society groups.

The origins of this narrative go back to Ivanishvili’s asset disputes with Credit Suisse. The dispute had to do with a Credit Suisse banker mishandling Ivanishvili’s assets, which started in the 2000s and has been ongoing since then.

Mdinaradze claimed that the West intentionally bankrupted the Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse to pressure the party’s founder and billionaire, Ivanishvili.

Prime Minister Kobakhdize told the public that Ivanishvili had refused to meet visiting Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, James O’Brien, during his visit to Tbilisi in May.

The reason for the refusal was the same in all cases: Ivanishvili said he was already under de facto sanctions because he had 2 billion dollars that he had entrusted to the West frozen, and then turning up in the hands of the Global War Party, Kobakhidze told the press conference.

Ivanishvili personally pushed the Global War Party conspiracy, accusing the Western “Global War party” of meddling in Georgia’s affairs, and instigating confrontations between Georgia and Russia, as well as in Ukraine.

He said Georgia is controlled by an external revolutionary committee, not an elected government, and labelled NGOs as pseudo-elites supported by foreign countries.

In his latest, campaign speech, Ivanishvili made the the Global War Party conspiracy central to Georgian Dream’s election bid, claiming that “the network of agents of the power with global influence”, which has attempted to turn Georgia into a “second front”, and supported “NGO-led revolutions”, is the war party which has to be defeated by the party of peace, thus making this election a choice between the two.

“We need an especially strong victory, which is equal to the constitutional majority, to finally put an end to the war party, the network of agents, radicalism, polarization and liberal fascism in Georgia”, Ivanishvili added, shedding light on his constitutional majority bid.

Western response

As Georgian Dream advanced the Russia-inspired foreign agents bill, naming its critics as agents, and announcing repressions ahead of elections, the West has been taking the ruling party’s drastic pro-Russian foreign policy shift and major democratic blow to its serious levels as the country has not witnessed before.

On 11 July, the US Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee passed the Georgia sanctions legislation

On 23 May, U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson introduced the “Mobilizing and Enhancing Georgia’s Options for Building Accountability, Resilience, and Independence Act” (MEGOBARI Act) in the House of Representatives.

The Act proposes sanctions against Georgian officials undermining democracy and requires US agencies to report to Congress on improper influence, sanctions evasion, and Russian intelligence assets in Georgia.

On the same day, Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Jim Risch, Ben Cardin, and Pete Ricketts introduced the “Georgian People’s Act” (GPA) in the Senate.

The bill proposes measures in response to the Georgian government’s recent actions, including sanctions on officials, a review of foreign assistance, and a reassessment of bilateral relations. The bill urges the Georgian government to address these issues, uphold democratic principles, and ensure free and fair elections in October.

Disinformation outlets in Georgia have claimed the MEGOBARI Act, as well as the Georgian Charter, a roadmap for Georgia’s European future, introduced by President Zourabichili, call for a coup d’etat.

Georgia was a subject of discussion between EU foreign ministers in June and the EU’s top diplomat Joseph Borell said after the meeting that the Georgian government is steering the country away from the EU.

If the government does not alter its course, Georgia will not make progress on its path to EU integration, Borrell said, announcing that Brussels would consider putting on hold the financial assistance to the government, as well as support from the bloc’s European Peace Facility.

In the next days, the US State Department announced the indefinite postponement of NATO Exercise Noble Partner as a part of a comprehensive review of the United States – Georgia bilateral relationship.

The EU’s ambassador to Georgia said the decision had been made at the Council to halt Georgia’s EU accession process and freeze €30 million support to Georgia from the European Peace Facility.

Regardless of the EU’s clear responses to the adoption of the foreign agent’s law, Kobakhidze claimed that the chances of opening accession negotiations were zero before the law was passed but now, the chances “increased to about 20-30%”.

At the beginning of June, US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller announced the implementation of the first tranche of sanctions, visa restrictions policy, against Georgians responsible for undermining democracy and freedom of assembly, intimidating civil society and spreading disinformation.

On the one hand, Georgian Dream says that blackmail through visa restrictions is a blatant attempt to undermine Georgia’s independence and sovereignty, and labels the imposition of sanctions on family members as a fascist-Bolshevik tactic.

On the other hand, they contend that such measures are counterproductive, harming only those who impose the sanctions, with some even denying the existence of these sanctions.

In August, the law requiring organisations to register with a central authority is expected to be introduced. Both civil society groups and the president of Georgia have appealed the law in the Constitutional Court, with civil society also planning to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

This article is part of the FREIHEIT media project on Europe’s Neighbourhood, funded by the European Media and Information Fund (EMIF).

[Edited by Alexandra Brzozowski/Zoran Radosavljevic]

Read more with Euractiv