Deadlock in Georgia

A Catalyst for the Crisis

If not its origin, then at least a substantial catalyst of the current stalemate between government and opposition were the Geor­gian parliamentary elections of autumn 2020. Georgian Dream officially won the elections, with a total of 90 of the 150 seats. The United National Movement took second place, with 36 seats. Voting occurred over two rounds: the first by proportional repre­sentation, the second by majority voting. Since all opposition parties boycotted the second round, however, Georgian Dream ran on its own. While international election observation missions assessed the elections as competitive and concluded that funda­mental freedoms had been preserved over­all, local watchdog organisations noted substantial deficits and irregularities. Since the opposition views the results as fraudu­lent, its representatives have refused to accept their mandates as a protest. Accord­ingly, on 11 December 2020 only the elected representatives of Georgian Dream took up their parliamentary activities. Since then, the opposition has been lambasting the “one-party parliament”. In its turn, the ruling party has condemned the boycott as a deliberate attempt by the opposition to destabilise the country. Six elected opposi­tion parliamentarians have now dropped the boycott and entered parliament, but the vast majority are standing by their refusal.

The current dilemma not least points to debates about what the parliament’s re­sponsibilities should be, and about insuf­ficient parliamentary oversight. A lack of experience in effectively implementing oversight mechanisms has contributed to preventing a sound parliamentary culture and practice from fully taking root. While there have been reforms in recent years aimed at strengthening parliamentary over­sight, these did not provide a clear enough definition of the role of the opposition. This has raised the question of how effective mutual institutional oversight is.

The crisis was exacerbated by the arrest on 23 February 2021 of the UNM Chair Nika Melia. The public prosecutor accuses him inciting and leading mass violence at street protests in 2019. The opposition has casti­gated the procedure as politically motivated. Giorgi Gakharia resigned as prime minister over the arrest; he appears to have been unable to impose his own view within Georgian Dream that arresting Melia would lead to further political escalation. How­ever, there are also structural challenges behind the current crisis.

Structural Challenges

Polarisation Prevents De‑escalation

The second and key domestic challenge for Georgia is the extreme polarisation of Geor­gian politics and media. An electoral system that favours the “winner takes all” principle has so far reliably led to election winners primarily being concerned with consolidating their own power, to the detriment of an effective implementation of the division of powers. In turn, this has intensified the confrontation between the governing party and opposition parties, which have mobi­lised their respective constituency (and thus parts of society) against each other. In gen­eral, the prevalent political culture in Geor­gia has not been conducive to integrative principles and processes, such as a readi­ness to compromise and accommodate, the establishment of coalitions, or the division of powers.

Structural causes for this political polarisation can be found above all in the party landscape. Many parties tend to concern themselves only with benefiting from the political events of the day without pursuing long-term strategies and programmes. They are often hierarchical and not organised in particularly democratic ways. The two largest and best-resourced parties in the country, Georgian Dream and the UNM, have tried especially hard to turn the polar­isation to their advantage. By presenting their respective opponent as the enemy and promoting this image, each has tried to position itself as the only option in the party competition. For several years, the two parties thus left little room for alter­native forces to emerge.

Georgian Dream has long been domi­nated by the billionaire and former prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili; the UNM by the former president Mikheil Saakashvili. Their respective rhetoric aims to give their party a monopoly in the political process. Both have thus intensified the political dis­cord in recent years.

Social media also act as tools of polarisation and radicalisation of the political spec­trum and at least part of the electorate. Political actors use them as platforms to spread disinformation about their political rivals. Moreover, the country’s most impor­tant television channels tend to act as mouthpieces of specific political groups. Their reporting is not aimed at objectivity but instead at popularising the political agenda and purposes of political camps. TV channels are by far the most significant source of information for political news and thus shape public opinion to a large extent.

A Prominent Role for the EU

The political crisis in Georgia also has a more specific impact on its relationship with the EU. In early 2020, after an elector­al law reform had failed in the Georgian parliament, several Western embassies offered space for talks aimed at finding a compromise between the governing party and the parliamentary opposition. Today embassies of the EU, EU member states and the US are again active as facilitators. After the parliamentary elections of October 2020, they once again brought the conflict parties together for negotiations at the latter’s request. It is hoped that they will end with a compromise.

However, this is a tightrope walk for the EU’s representatives, who risk getting caught up themselves in the showdown between the governing party and opposition, and being viewed, or turned into, a part of the domestic Georgian row. In mid-December 2020, for instance, the UNM and circles close to it made accusations against Western diplomats. The then UNM Chair­man, Grigol Vashadze, named these allega­tions as one reason for his subsequent with­drawal from the party. In early February 2021 the EU ambassador attracted the dis­pleasure of Georgian Dream. He had criti­cised one of its members of parliament for making public the phone number of a journalist known to be close to the UNM, calling the act a violation of data protection. Members of the European Parliament felt compelled to issue a joint statement to signal their support for the ambassador. In response to criticisms by the chair of the foreign affairs committee of the Lithuanian parliament, the new Georgian Prime Minis­ter Irakli Garibashvili, moreover, declared on 22 February 2021, the day that his appointment was confirmed, that such outside interference was unacceptable.

From Facilitation to Mediation

Yet the EU plays an ever more important role in Georgia’s domestic controversy. During a visit to Georgia in early March 2021, the President of the European Coun­cil, Charles Michel, conceded that it was time to move from mere facilitation to active mediation. After his visit, Michel and the High Representative Josep Borrell ap­pointed Christian Danielsson, from Sweden, to be the Personal Envoy and travel to Tbilisi for mediation purposes. The US em­bassy continues to participate in these talks too. Alongside the issues of whether to call new elections and release Melia, they are likely to revolve around reforming the justice system and electoral law, strengthening parliamentary oversight and identi­fying any potential for de-polarisation. After two rounds of mediation ended with­out the parties reaching a compromise – and after a strongly worded statement by leading MEPs that failure to do so will reflect on future EU-Georgia relations – Brussels is currently mulling its next steps.

Georgia and Its Volatile Neighbourhood

Georgia is the only country in the South Caucasus to have concluded an association agreement with the EU and to pursue the long-term objective of joining the EU and NATO. It faces at least five key changes and development prospects in its neighbourhood. First, Georgia’s neighbours Russia and Turkey have grown in importance for its two other neighbours, Armenia and Azerbaijan, in the context of the escalation in autumn of 2020. Second, Georgia per­ceives a deterioration in its own security situation. Since the stationing of Russian troops in Azerbaijan, Georgians are very sensitive to the fact – not least in light of Russia’s increased dominance in the Black Sea basin – that their country is now geo­graphically surrounded by Russian troops. Third, Tbilisi faces the question of what the consequences might be for Georgia con­cerning Turkey’s new role in the South Caucasus and the development of Turkish-Russian relations in the region. Fourth, the agreement of 10 November 2020 aims to reopen regional communication links, which have been blocked because of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict; there are debates in Georgia about what impact such a reopening would have on its own role as a transit country and the future it envisages as a regional transport hub. And fifth, the strengthening of Russia’s influence in the South Caucasus is perceived as a factor that could further threaten Georgia’s ambition to join the EU and NATO.

An Imbalance of Supply and Demand

For some time, there have been discussions within the region, but more and more often also among various actors in the EU, about whether the EU can remain relevant to the needs of the countries in its eastern neigh­bourhood. The most recent escalation in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has given these debates momentum. Key EU deficits cited include its insufficient offers of secu­rity cooperation and its limited role as an actor in conflict transformation. The dis­cussions also concern Georgia, which faces issues of national security and the unresolved conflicts with Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

However, there is a certain amount of tension between security cooperation and engagement in conflict transformation. Pushing ahead in both areas is not neces­sarily compatible. The EU deals with the conflicts over the breakaway de-facto states Abkhazia and South Ossetia mainly at the level of immediate parties in the conflicts (Tbilisi, Sukhum/i and Tskhinval/i), whereas Georgian actors tend to view the conflicts mainly through the prism of Georgian-Russian relations. Tbilisi considers Euro-Atlantic integration, ideally including secu­rity cooperation, a shield against Russia, among other things. However, Georgia’s closer links with the EU mean that the latter is not perceived as a neutral conflict mediator in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As a consequence, the EU has virtually no leverage vis-à-vis them.

Although the EU’s engagement in conflict transformation remains limited, it has tried – especially following the 2008 Russo-Georgian war – to expand it. To this end, it has created the EU Monitoring Mis­sion and the EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the Crisis in Geor­gia; co-chaired the Geneva Discussions be­tween the involved parties; and financially supported measures for conflict transformation. Simultaneously, however, the EU’s room for manoeuvre in these areas has be­come more complicated. It has to act in a multidimensional conflict setting since the conflict between Georgia, the de-facto states, and Russia is unfolding on several levels. The fraught relationship between the EU and Russia also limits the EU’s ability to make an impact.

Yet the current domestic political crisis in Georgia is not conducive to Georgian politicians finding their own constructive policy approaches. This is also true for deal­ing with the de-facto states, among other things. At the moment, it appears that attempts to set (foreign) policy objec­tives are being impeded by domestic politics or specific power interests. Evidently domestic controversies tie up so many resources that it lowers output. It is therefore neither in Georgia’s nor in the EU’s interests to let the current situation become permanent.