As Georgia votes, fears of a stolen election and a return to the Kremlin’s orbit loom large

By Christian Edwards, CNN

(CNN) — At the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, the small Georgian town where the Soviet dictator was born, a line of guides is waiting to tell you the story of the local boy who made it big.

They can list the birthdays of Stalin’s family and recite the poems he wrote as a schoolboy (for Stalin “could have been a poet, but chose to be a great leader”). But on other things, they are less exact. Of the millions killed in the gulag, “mistakes were made.” Of show trials, they have little to say.

So revered is Stalin by some that when the government thought it time to remove his towering statue in 2010, they did so unannounced at night, lest locals protest. But while some older voters in rural towns like Gori might harbor fond memories of life under communism and pine for a Soviet past, they seemed set to be swept away by younger generations who have grown up knowing nothing but democracy, and who are happy to see Stalin consigned to history’s dustbin.

Now, as voters in the Caucasus nation cast their ballots in Saturday’s parliamentary election, the specter of authoritarianism looms large once again.

Many observers fear the ruling Georgian Dream party will resort to anything to stay in power. It has buried the liberal values it espoused when it took office 12 years ago and effectively torpedoed Georgia’s bid to join the European Union. Its founder, the secretive oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has threatened to imprison his political rivals after the election and ban the main opposition party.

After spending years in the shadows, Ivanishvili – who made his billions in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as Georgia’s prime minister from 2012 to 2013 – returned late last year as the party’s honorary chairman and has since given a string of conspiracy-tinged speeches. He claims Georgia is being controlled by a foreign “pseudo-elite” and that the opposition belongs to a “Global War Party” bent on dragging the country into conflict with Russia. This year, Georgian Dream pushed through a Kremlin-style “foreign agent” law, which critics say aims to shut down watchdogs who call the government to account.

For many, Ivanishvili’s rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the past from which many Georgians are keen to escape. And the anti-Western posturing of Georgian Dream, along with the country’s controversial foreign agent law, directly mirrors President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on domestic political opposition in neighboring Russia.

“It’s incredible how much of this old Bolshevik, Stalinist language is back. Everybody’s a traitor, everybody’s a foreign agent,” Natalie Sabanadze, a fellow at the London think-tank Chatham House and former Georgian ambassador to the EU, told CNN. She described some of the statements made by Georgian Dream officials as a “copy-paste” of those from Stalin’s show trials. “Have people forgotten what it was like?” Sabanadze asks.

In a speech last month in Gori, Ivanishvili also broke a taboo in Georgian society. He said Georgia should apologize for the 2008 war with Russia, for which many Georgians blame Moscow. Russia fought the five-day war in support of pro-Kremlin separatists in Georgia’s South Ossetia region, just north of Gori. Combined with Abkhazia, another breakaway region, Russia today de facto occupies 20% of Georgia’s territory.

Ivanishvili said apologizing to Russia would help preserve “12 years of uninterrupted peace” the country has enjoyed under Georgian Dream’s leadership, which he warned the opposition could jeopardize. The message has some appeal to his rural base but sparked a political firestorm.

Mikheil Saakashvili, who was Georgia’s president during the war but has been imprisoned since 2021 for abuse of power while in office, called the comments a “betrayal.”

Younger, more pro-European Georgians were also outraged. Their earliest memories are not of easier lives under communism, but of Russian tanks rolling into Gori and towards the capital, Tbilisi. Walking out of the Stalin Museum – past his personal railway carriage, past the hut in which he was born – it is easy to find buildings still scarred with bullet holes from the 2008 war. Many buildings still lie in ruins, while Stalin Avenue has been kept pristine.

For these Georgians, Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 rekindled memories of Russian aggression in their own country. They want nothing more than for Georgia to slip from the Kremlin’s orbit and continue its march toward a European future.

But many fear the government is now heading in the opposite direction, and that Georgia could be on the cusp of returning to the one-party rule from which it escaped a generation ago.

“The election will be crucial,” Davit Mzhavanadze, a researcher at the Governance Monitoring Center in Tbilisi, told CNN. “If this government keeps power, Georgia will become more Belarusian than European.”

At a press conference in Tbilisi on Thursday, Georgia’s President Salome Zourabichvili – a pro-Western but largely ceremonial figure who has urged Georgians to vote against the government – said she “rules out any outcome other than a victory for the pro-European forces,” citing polls which routinely show that only around a third of the public support Georgian Dream.

‘Soviet mentality’

A question puzzling many is why the formerly center-left Georgian Dream has made a sudden authoritarian pivot.

The party’s origin was unusual. It takes its name from a rap song by Ivanishvili’s son, Bera. Although some suspected Ivanishvili – whose net worth is equivalent to about a quarter of the country’s GDP – might pursue a pro-Russian path, during his brief premiership he tacked close to Europe and even promised eventual NATO membership.

“A modern civil society has been a cherished goal of the Georgian people since we regained our independence 20 years ago,” Ivanishvili wrote in an email to then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, subsequently leaked. “Unfortunately, old habits are hard to overcome.”

That has proved true for his own government, Sabanadze of Chatham House told CNN. Her career is a measure of Georgian Dream’s ideological shifts. As recently as 2021, Sabanadze served as Georgia’s ambassador to the EU. Now, she says she’s troubled by the party’s shift to the right.

Having abandoned its liberal origins, Sabanadze said, the party is now “clearly copying” the model of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest this year, Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze praised Orban as a “role model,” parroting his claims to defend “homeland, language and faith.” The government has also passed legislation curbing LGBTQ+ rights.

But now it is poised to go much further. Ivanishvili has promised a “Nuremberg trial” against members of the opposition, who have been subject to increasing persecution. During street protests in Tbilisi against the foreign agent law, Levan Khabeishvili – chair of the pro-Western United National Movement (UNM) – said he was brutally beaten by police. He appeared the next day in parliament, his face blackened and swollen.

Khabeishvili has since stepped down as chairman, citing the effect the beating had on his health. He said the assault was meant to intimidate Georgia’s opposition. “Ivanishvili has a Soviet mentality. He’s a Soviet guy,” he told CNN.

The Georgian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Preparing for the worst

A consequence of Russia’s war in Ukraine was the EU’s decision to offer Georgia candidate status. Brussels, keen to stem Russia’s influence in former Soviet countries, put Georgia – along with Ukraine and Moldova – on an accelerated path to membership.

Many say this was despite Georgian Dream, rather than because of it. During protests against the “foreign agent” law, the images of citizens waving EU flags being buffeted back by water cannons put pressure on Brussels to reward the Georgian people, of whom more than 80% support EU membership, polls show.

Whether Ivanishvili wanted candidate status is not clear. Joining the EU would require cleaning up the country’s judiciary and giving up power if Georgian Dream is voted out on Saturday. His opponents doubt he is willing to do this.

Under the country’s new proportional voting system, Khabeishvili of the UNM says Georgia’s fragmented opposition will have no trouble forming a coalition after the election. But he fears that Ivanishvili will seek to cling to power after an election loss.

If this happens, he predicts huge protests in Tbilisi and throughout the country. Here, things could get ugly. Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said in August that Georgia’s Western allies are plotting a coup to remove Georgian Dream from power. He warned Russia will be on standby to prevent this.

For Sabanadze, the stakes could not be higher: How Georgians vote on Saturday, and how the government responds, will determine whether the country remains on a path to Europe or becomes more like Belarus.

“When I was in Brussels, I thought that Georgia would never become an authoritarian state again, because it’s just something that we find very difficult to accept,” she said. “Georgians will put up a fight. The Belarus scenario will not happen easily.”

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