Another domino falls to Vladimir Putin after Georgia’s tense election

The election in Georgia on October 26th was a crucial moment for a country once hailed by the West for its democratic reforms. Its pro-European opposition saw it as perhaps the last chance to repair the damage done by the current anti-Western government and put the country back on track towards membership of the eu. If the official results are to be believed, that chance seems to have slipped away: they showed a decisive victory for the ruling, Russia-appeasing,  Georgian Dream party, with 54% of the vote. Election authorities said an alliance of four opposition parties took just 38%. If the result stands Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is closer than ever to its goal of creating another client state. The Georgian poll has taken place alongside another important test of Russian influence-operations, a two-stage presidential election in Moldova that ends in the coming week.

In Georgia election-monitoring groups say they have identified wide-scale violations of electoral law and the opposition has refused to accept the results. The election was “stolen”, said Tina Bokuchava, head of the United National Movement (unm) party, at a post-midnight briefing after the election. “We will not give up our European future.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, Georgian Dream has taken Georgia, once a Western ally, into uncharted waters. The party is controlled by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a reclusive billionaire who made his fortune in Russia. The government took a neutral stance on the Ukraine war, angering its pro-Western citizens. It has veered towards authoritarianism, showing a new willingness to beat and intimidate protesters and opponents. Although it applied for candidate status in the eu (and received it last December), it quickly set about sabotaging that accomplishment, in part by constantly criticising the West. Accession talks are now suspended.

The opposition parties consider all of this an embrace of the Kremlin. Their mantra was that the election was a choice between Europe and Russia. Georgian Dream promulgated an elaborate conspiracy theory, that a “Global War Party” from the West was trying to install the Georgian opposition in power in order to drag the country into war against Russia. In the closing days of the campaign the party launched a grisly ad campaign juxtaposing images of war-torn Ukraine with those of prosperous Georgia. “No War, Choose Peace”, the ads read.

The Kremlin has openly praised Georgian Dream’s accommodationist stance, and Russia’s intelligence service claimed that America was planning a “Tbilisi Maidan” to oust the party. The reference to Ukraine’s revolution in 2014, which Russia used as a pretext for its wars against that country, was ominous for Georgia, which already lost a war to Russia in 2008.

The “choose peace” message may have resonated with voters. “We want Europe,” said Levan Kobaladze, a 60-something doctor, as he left a polling station on Tbilisi’s central avenue. “But Western countries, America, they just want to make you do what they want.” In the war in 2008, he complained, Georgia’s Western allies did nothing to help. “Only promises, and because of these promises we already had war with Russia.” Now, he thinks, it is happening again. If Russia attacks, “in three days we will be absolutely destroyed. All Georgia will be in ruins.”

Yet it also seems that there were irregularities in the election. A local monitoring mission, My Vote, said it had identified a “large-scale” effort to rig the vote, which included intimidation of voters and monitors and repeat voting. A law passed in May requiring foreign-funded organisations to identify as “foreign agents” made it hard for them to recruit monitors.

On election morning, a group of three unm volunteers received word that there was something shady going on in a polling station in Tbilisi’s old town: the fluid used to mark voters’ fingers to prevent them from voting multiple times was in fact transparent. They arrived to investigate but found nothing amiss. They stuck around just in case. Was the voting fair? “Not so much,” answered Tatia Psuturi, the group’s head. “That’s why I’m watching carefully.”

In the countryside there were reports of blatant cheating, but they were hard to quantify. Many far-flung regions showed improbably high margins (up to 90%) for Georgian Dream. Christo Grozev of Bellingcat, an investigative group, reported shortly before the vote that Russian intelligence agents had proposed hacking it. But Georgia conducts a backup hand count of ballots; the results are expected on October 28th. They are not expected to differ significantly from the electronically tabulated ones released already.

The result in Georgia followed a referendum in Moldova over whether it should aspire to join the eu, which took place a week before. The pro-euamendment to the constitution eked out only a narrow victory. It had been expected to pass comfortably. Maia Sandu, Moldova’s president, blamed a massive vote-buying scheme led by Russia. She performed worse than expected in the first round of a two-round presidential race, which concludes with a run-off vote on November 3rd.

What happens next in Georgia? The scale of Georgia Dream’s victory (and perhaps the fraud) has taken the wind out of the opposition’s sails. The streets of central Tbilisi were eerily empty after the first results were announced. The situation echoed that after the last parliamentary elections in 2020, when opposition claims of widespread cheating were not backed up by Western governments. Protests soon petered out. This time around it remains possible that after a delay there is an upsurge of protests. The armed forces, which might have to choose sides in a worst-case scenario, lean towards America. Yet the biggest concern is that Georgia now quietly slips away from the West. Giorgi Kapatadze, a student and one of the observers, said his country was headed in the direction of “Venezuela or Belarus”.