(Bloomberg) -- Nana Dvalishvili is angry. Standing outside Georgia’s parliament in central Tbilisi along with thousands of fellow anti-government protesters, she says her country’s leaders never seem to learn from history.
“It happens all the time,” said the 55-year-old real estate agent, who came with her teenage children to demonstrate. “A government gets elected because it wants us to vote and then doesn’t want to go peacefully and democratically. Then we have to rally, and they use force.”
Georgia has been defined by protest, from the Soviet era through to the Rose Revolution two decades ago and now this year against the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party. What’s different this time is that the Caucasus country of less than 4 million people is another front in the new Cold War between Moscow and the West that only looks set to escalate.
The country’s president and figurehead for the opposition, Salome Zourabichvili, is calling it Georgia’s “Maidan,” referring to the uprising in Ukraine in 2013 that spelled the end for the country’s pro-Russian leadership.
One key ingredient is there: the fresh ire is over Georgia’s government effectively halting progress toward integration with Europe in favor of reinforcing ties with Russia. That followed protests in spring over its “foreign agent” law and a disputed election victory in October.
In recent days, Georgia’s ambassadors to Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and the US announced their resignations. Thousands more people took to the streets.
“This has the potential to become a Maidan-like movement because the underlying reasons are very similar,” said Thornike Gordadze, a professor at Sciences Po, the Paris institute of political studies, and a former Georgian government minister. “Georgian society today is arguably more attached to Europe than Ukraine was back then, which could make this even more significant.”
It’s a sentiment that resonates with many of the younger generation driving the nightly protests. They reignited when Georgian Dream, founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, won elections before escalating again last week.
Police have detained more than 200 people since the new clashes began and used water cannons and tear gas while demonstrators have built barricades and thrown fireworks. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze blamed “radicals and their foreign chiefs” for the violence.
The protests take place outside parliament, a symbolic location where the Soviet army brutally crushed Georgian protesters in April 1989. In 2003, it was the theater for the Rose Revolution as future President Mikheil Saakashvili led a march on the building, also after disputed elections.
Women are front and center, while people bring their dogs and kids. Protesters sleep alongside stray animals, while restaurants and cafes send a mix of food from pizzas to traditional khachapuri to sustain them. Several schools suspended classes temporarily as students and educators marched through the city over consecutive days.
“Police grabbed me by my throat just because I am here to denounce what I have heard,” said Sandro, 21, who works for an internet company. “They’ve said enough, we know what they’re planning. We will fight, of course.”
The protests risk intensifying because the government won’t engage, according to Zourabichvili, the president. She has encouraged the backlash against what she called a “Russian special operation” seeking to bolster Moscow’s influence. The Kremlin has said the unrest is a domestic Georgian issue.
The Constitutional Court, though, this week rejected her challenge to the election result. She had called the victory for Georgian Dream a “fraud,” while the party said the vote was conducted fairly.
“When you close one by one all the possibilities, what you are doing in fact is increasing the frustration of the people that are on the streets,” Zourabichvili said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Tuesday. “And everyone knows that increased frustration can then lead to anything.”
Yet, the baggage of the past is never far away. Some of the older generation remember the stability of the Soviet Union with fondness and are afraid the country will erupt. They point to Georgia’s brief war with Russia in 2008, as well as Ukraine today. They don’t want to antagonize Moscow.
Bloomberg reported in October that Russian spies were watching Georgia’s government and major companies in an espionage and hacking campaign for years, gaining power to potentially sabotage critical infrastructure.
Tbilisi is just a few kilometers from the heavily fortified checkpoint that protects the entrance to South Ossetia, the Georgian region whose independence Russia recognized after the war 16 years ago.
The five-day war left Georgians with a sense that breaking away from Russia might never be achievable. Georgia lost two major territories and still has more than a quarter of a million internally displaced people. Russian troops remain stationed in South Ossetia and the other breakaway region of Abkhazia.
The conflict erupted only months after the North Atlantic Treaty Organization opened the door at its 2008 summit to potential future membership for Ukraine and Georgia, to Russia’s fury. Georgia has hosted numerous training exercises with NATO troops and is committed under its constitution to seek membership of the military alliance, something Moscow insists must never happen.
Georgian Dream has a policy of economic reconnection with Russia while avoiding open political alignment. The stance is to maintain trade ties, especially for industries like wine and tourism. It, too, evokes the war. Election posters pictured destroyed Ukrainian cities alongside renovation projects by the government in Georgia.
Makusha Bakhtadze, an artist in her mid-50s who specializes in making jewelry, supports the government and said she wants to avoid becoming like Ukraine. She says the opposition would bring chaos. “Finally, we have a government that thinks like a statesman,” she said. “I am not scared, we defend our rights and traditions and I have a very decent health insurance.”
The divide within Georgia has echoes of Ukraine and Moldova, where a referendum on European Union membership passed only by a wafer-thin margin amid claims of a pro-Russian propaganda campaign and vote-buying.
Georgia applied to join the EU in 2022 along with the two other former Soviet states, but the bloc never formally agreed to open membership negotiations. Brussels said the crackdown on protesters over the “foreign agent” law put a halt on efforts to join the bloc. The EU said the legislation was similar to President Vladimir Putin’s crushing of pro-democracy groups in Russia.
One scenario is a peaceful revolution, with Western powers pressuring Georgian Dream to hold a new vote under a reformed electoral commission, according to Gordadze, the academic in Paris. The issue is time. If the crisis is left to be resolved on the streets, it could get nastier, he said.
Indeed, more so now than ever, there’s also a culture war between those Georgians who want to assimilate more with Western Europe and those who want to remain in Russia’s orbit.
“Georgia risks having a lost generation of younger people with failed dreams,” said Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But even if the protesters succeed and Georgia stands a much better chance of becoming part of the European family, the fight will be far from over. There is little doubt that the Kremlin will keep creating more hurdles.”
--With assistance from Ilya Arkhipov and Anthony Halpin.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
