For years, the Georgian Dream has been subverting the democratization agenda that has long been intertwined with the process of Georgia’s European integration.
However, in recent years and especially in 2024, Georgia has seen an accelerated form of autocratization, with a democratic facade coming off altogether as the Georgian Dream (GD) fully eroded or attacked all democratic accountability actors in the country through capturing judiciary, adopting repressive laws and manipulating elections.
Importantly, this accelerated autocratization has also unfolded in parallel with the reversal of European integration. This unprecedented turn in Georgia’s foreign policy has gone beyond GD’s antagonistic and hostile rhetoric vis-a-vis the European Union (EU) representatives since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And recently, it manifested on the policy level with the passing of two restrictive bills in 2024 known as ‘foreign agent’ (or ‘Russian’) and ‘anti-LGBTQ+’ laws and culminated in GD’s decision to suspend the EU accession process until 2028.
Facing this dual uncertainty regarding the democratic and European future, a new form of societal accountability is emerging in Georgia. It is about individual citizens feeling accountable for the future of their country, and it has been fuelling different waves of protests in recent years. This societal accountability is deeply embedded in the sense of solidarity among citizens and belonging to Europe. Importantly, it is in direct opposition to another, yet subverted form of accountability that has emerged in Georgia in the last decade: informal accountability – when those in power or in its proximity are accountable to an informal influential leader instead of their citizens.
Georgia’s pathway towards autocratization: erosion of old accountability mechanisms and emergence of new ones?
The Georgian case serves as an important reminder that autocratization might unfold first in an incremental, gradual way, often concealed behind a democratization facade, which may be followed by accelerated, full-fledged autocratization. Like other autocrats, GD attacked all democratic accountability actors one by one by starting with an already flawed judiciary. This has been done gradually, under the disguise of the years-long reform process. During which the reform agenda itself has been instrumentalized to capture, politicize and pack courts with the regime loyalists. Today, these courts and judges presiding over them serve as important agents of autocratization, as they punish the regime challengers.
As GD successfully subdued the judiciary system, it turned to organized civil society and media. Both have acted as vigilant watchdogs, exposing early signs of undemocratic intentions and attempts at autocratization. The first substantial signs of shrinking civic space in Georgia appeared in 2023 when Georgian Dream attempted for the first time to pass the ‘foreign agent’ law, which it eventually adopted in 2024 despite fierce pushback from society. Furthermore, the recently adopted ‘anti-LGBTQ+’ law not only targets the LGBTQ+ community but threatens to close down all available spaces of contestation.
Today, Georgian CSOs and critical media still remain at the forefront of resistance against autocratization, but they are in existential danger and face daunting uncertainty over when and in what forms the repressive laws will fully be unleashed against them.
Perhaps the most important mechanism of democratic accountability – citizens holding those in power responsible through casting a ballot – has been shaky in Georgia, as it has only once experienced a peaceful power transfer through elections. However, the 2024 October parliamentary elections still managed to be a final blow to it. GD managed to orchestrate a large-scale vote manipulation and thus stole the right to free and fair elections from citizens.
New societal accountability vis-à-vis GD’s informal accountability?
While it is widely recognized that the key drivers of autocratization are elected officials, in hybrid regimes, democratic accountability may be eroded to replace it with informal accountability – when the responsibility of those in power lies towards the informal authoritative figure(s) instead of their constituencies. In Georgia, the billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, the honorary chairman and founder of GD, has long remained in the shadow of politics, pulling the strings behind the curtain. Autocratization in the context of the existence of such informal powerful actors might be shaped differently as the political party in power is devoid of responsibility towards its citizens, and therefore, institutional channels for citizens’ participation slowly lose their true meaning as the real power lies within an unelected individual(s).
In this context, we see the emergence of a new form of societal accountability in Georgia, with its citizens taking the matter into their own hands and self-organizing to protest with a strong sense of responsibility to save their country’s democratic and European future.
Even though protests are not new in Georgia, they have always involved a rather centralized strategy with a political leadership at its forefront. In contrast, in the last two years, the protests against ‘foreign agent’ law in 2023 and early 2024, and more recently, eruption of permanent protests in late 2024, have shown that we are witnessing not just a new type of protests that are being decentralized, lacking political leadership and expanding beyond the capital, but also the emergence of individual citizens as the main agents of accountability is at hand.
The recent waves of protests shows that nature of citizens’ dissent goes beyond just expressing grievances and involves a strong sense of responsibility for their country’s future. Various initiatives from crowdfunding to online solidarity campaigns, first-ever nationwide strike in recent history and daily marches of different professions representing various layers of society despite increasingly repressive tactics from the state – points to the citizens perseverance in holding GD accountable for its actions.
The new societal accountability in Georgia also has a strong sense of Europeanness that does not just manifest in the large number of EU flags visible at the manifestations. The fact that it was GD’s decision about suspending EU accession until 2028 that sparked another large wave of protests, is a testament to this. This is not the first time that Georgians have gone to the streets to protect their European choice. They protested to demand Georgian government to apply for the EU membership in 2022 and later when the European Commission granted them European perspective instead of the candidate status as it did with Ukraine and Moldova. Yet again, the fight for the future of democracy and European integration became intertwined in Georgia.
A foundation for durable democratic change?
The visible shift towards forming civic-minded, engaged citizenship in Georgia starkly contrasts with GD’s and its proxies’ blind loyalism to Ivanishvili, which has a devastating effect on the country’s internal affairs and further isolates it from a democratic part of the world. Georgian citizens’ individual and collective acts of resistance thus face an increasingly repressive captured state whose resources are unequal to those that challenge it. In this context, any external democratic support needs to focus on bolstering grass-roots civic initiatives, all the while strengthening organized civil society and media and urgently speeding up efforts to pressure autocratizers.
For Georgia to rebuild its formal democratic safeguards and ensure their durability and resilience, citizens’ direct and meaningful participation is necessary. If popular protest and resistance prevail against autocratization, this new societal accountability holds the potential to become a foundation for Georgia’s bottom-up democratic transformation in the future.
However, it may still be in its infancy, and whether it transforms into a cornerstone for enduring democratic change in Georgia remains to be seen. Different factors will determine its future, including having democratic allies that do not hold back and provide swift support. The world has too many examples of such democratic potential evaporating due to limited support or late reactions on their part. It cannot allow it to be wasted in yet another society.
Ana Andguladze
Ana Andguladze is a researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Her research interests include opposition to democratic backsliding, civil society, EU enlargement, and the Eastern Partnership initiative. Her academic work has been published in European Politics and Society and Palgrave Macmillan. She is the author of multiple policy-oriented publications for various think tanks and has a diverse background, mixing academic and practical experience.
