Incumbents Touting Desire To Turn Georgia Into A One-Party State

By Giorgi Lomsadze

(Eurasianet) -- Many Georgians who witnessed the death of a one-party state just over 30 years ago never thought they would live to see the birth of another one. Yet, it appears to be happening in plain sight just ahead of parliamentary elections in October. 

As its key campaign promise, the incumbent Georgian Dream party is vowing to ban virtually all opposition political parties and rule unilaterally. The governing party’s billionaire founder and Georgia’s effective political puppet-master, Bidzina Ivanishvili, is promising an authoritarian makeover for the country as he makes stops along the campaign trail.

Ivanishvili’s threats are directed primarily at the United National Movement (UNM) – the Georgian Dream’s archnemesis and currently the largest opposition party in parliament. But Ivanishvili has also made clear that all his political rivals are subject to being given “red cards” for opposing his agenda.

“The October 26 election must become the Nuremberg Trials for the [United] National Movement,”saidIvanishvili at a whistle stop in the historic town of Mtskheta on August 22. Accusing UNM of treasonous acts, Ivanishvili asked voters to help Georgian Dream retain supermajority in the parliament to help initiate the process of outlawing the governing party’s main challenger.

But Ivanishvili also said a ban will be extended to other political groups. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze – an ardent Ivanishvili loyalist – later provided a full list of parties that Georgian Dream intends to blacklist. The list just happens to include all groups and alliances that, according to polling data, stand a chance of entering the parliament in October.

Getting into the nitty-gritty of the planned ban, the prime minister said his party is going to seek a Constitutional Court order to shut down all these groups and unseat their members from parliament. “I believe the logical next step would be to invalidate the parliamentary mandates,” Kobakhidzetoldan August 23 press briefing. “You can’t have criminal members of a criminal force have the status of a member of Georgian parliament.”

If the ruling party goes through with its plan, Georgian Dream may not encounter much resistance within the Constitutional Court. Democracy watchdogs charge that Ivanishvili and Georgian Dream exercise a controlling influence over the judiciary. Parliament is the only place where Georgian Dream is facing meaningful political dissent at present.

When pressed by journalists about the potential international reaction to such a comprehensive filtering of the political spectrum, the prime minister claimed a one-party state can be democratic. “Moldova’s parliament is essentially a one-party parliament, yet everyone hails Moldova’s parliament,” Kobakhidze said, making a misleading analogy.

Opinion polls suggest that many Georgians are weary of supersized political parties and hope that this election results in a coalition government. A wide array of political groups and alliances is challenging Georgian Dream in the October 26 election.

Some of these groups are working together to unseat Georgian Dream, but others are also running against each other, competing for the disenchanted and swing votes. In their campaign rhetoric however, Ivanishvili and Georgian Dream are lumping together all of their rivals into a supposed singular force that serves hostile foreign interests and seeks to embroil Georgia in conflict with Russia.

Georgian Dream uses a term “Collective UNM” to describe this supposed all-encompassing force, implying that one way or another all of its rivals are linked to the main opposition party. The strategy aims to confuse voters and tap into the significant, lingering public animus toward UNM over abuses of authority committed over a decade ago, when the party and its founder, the former president Mikhail Saakashvili, held power in Georgia.

Georgian Dream unseated UNM in 2012, partly on the promise of Ivanishvili’s personal wealth trickling down to the voters, but also on the promise of establishing a truly democratic system of governance and the rule of law. But the party that started out as a coalition of pro-democracy groups has morphed into a monolith, relying on a guiding ideology rooted in little other than loyalty to Ivanishvili.

Over the years, Georgian Dream carefully strengthened partisan influence over government agencies and branches of power. In the last couple of years, the establishment has grown increasingly conservative and insular, promoting family values and pickingfightswith Georgia’s longtime partners, the United States and the European Union.

Now the party appears to be entering the homestretch of an authoritarian transformation. The threat to eliminate political competition would put the cherry on top of a year that has seen the Georgian Dream-dominated parliament’s adoption of acontroversiallawthat threatens to stigmatize and potentially muzzle democracy watchdogs and independent media, as well as other legislation that assigns members of the LGBTQ community second-class citizenship status.

Many Georgian observers are convinced that the establishment does not have the capacity to go through with its threats and suppress likely public resistance. In any event, the ruling party’s rhetoric marks a low democratic point for a country that once showed the most promise in the region dominated by authoritarian regimes.

• Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.