Russia has enough levers to put pressure on Georgia - expert

INTERVIEWS  17 April 2022 - 15:37

Caliber.Az presents an interview with Gogi Tushmalishvili, a Georgian expert in political sociology and lecturer at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs (GIPA).

- Please, tell us, why does the ruling Georgian Dream attract the society?

The answer to this question should probably be divided into two parts: why the Georgian Dream party attracted the Georgian electorate twelve years ago when it came to power, and how, or rather by what means, this party retains the power to this day.

Firstly, it should be noted that the Georgian Dream embodies a single person - the informal ruler of the country Bidzina Ivanishvili, without whom it is difficult to imagine any electoral success of the ruling party, so low is the trust of the vast majority of Georgians to the other, formal bosses of the GM party.

As for Ivanishvili, his image has long ago, since the nineties, been as a mythical hero, a certain Count of Monte Cristo, who once went to work in Moscow as a young villager and became fabulously rich there. Ivanishvili's myth was helped by the fact that the public at large had not seen him for a long time. That is we did not even know what he looked like at all. He did not give any interviews and his image did not appear on TV or in newspapers. On the other hand, we heard various stories glorifying Bidzina Ivanishvili. For example, we heard a story about how when he was a kid his schoolteacher paid for him when they were collecting money for a school excursion, and Ivanishvili's family did not have money for it, and that later, when he got rich, Bidzina literally loaded her with money.

Or that in his native village of Chorvila he built houses for his fellow villagers and gave them a Niva car as a gift. We also saw him building a futuristic castle in Tbilisi, on a hill in the old Sololaki neighborhood. We were told that this castle had a huge aquarium, where sharks were swimming, and zebras and giraffes were roaming in his garden. And of course, all this struck the imagination of a certain part of society.

When it became known before the 2012 parliamentary elections that he had created a coalition called Georgian Dream, people began to reason something like this: If this man was able to make it from rags to riches, and gave his villagers houses and cars, maybe he will help us too? Maybe, thanks to the genius of such a manager, we will be able to live better?

The fantastic promises made by Ivanishvili and his team were of paramount importance. For instance, they were promising "free money", which, in human language, would mean interest-free loans in one bank or another. They also promised five million dollars per village and a hundred new factories per month. And, of course, a special emphasis was placed on the "atrocities" of Saakashvili and his associates, who had hands stained in blood. The vilification of the "nationalists", i.e. Saakashvili's party, was carried out in several directions: along with stories about the atrocities of law enforcers, stories were told about the large-scale economic malpractice of the authorities. For example, Ivanishvili himself said that Saakashvili was in cahoots with the oil companies operating in Georgia, pocketing one GEL from each liter of gasoline poured into the gas tanks of Georgian motorists. And no one in today's government will explain to us properly how it happened that the average price of gasoline rose from GEL 1.50  back then to almost GEL 4 for some reason.

As for the ways in which "GM" manages to retain the power to this day, they use a wide range of means, from exorbitant bloat in the number of staff at state-run organizations to the usual bribing of voters. Moreover, such bribery does not cost much to the authorities - in some regions people are ready to vote for the "GM" and receive a reward of only a few kilos of onions and potatoes. Classical methods of intimidation and psychological pressure on the voter are also in use.

As an ideological justification for their right to stay in power, the "GM" speakers claim a certain "stability" that they have brought to the life of the country. Although strange "stability" - knowing that almost every other day people living in the Tskhinvali region are grabbed by Russian soldiers and taken to the Tskhinvali police cell for violation of the so-called "border" with South Ossetia.

And there was also a case when a "border guard" from separatist Abkhazia, after a cross-talk with a citizen of Georgia, chased the latter to the Georgian-controlled territory, shot him with a gun, and quietly returned across the "border" to the separatist territory. All this was filmed on camera and despite the formal actions taken, the criminal has not been detained to this day.

Thus, the "GM" has very dubious achievements in all areas, be it economics, finances, the fight against corruption and crime, human rights, foreign policy, etc.

- So you think that Georgia is not a democratic state today?

I think that in Georgia we are witnessing a kind of hybrid state between an authoritarian regime and a liberal democracy. Obviously, this is not the Uganda of Idi Amin's times, but on the other hand, the courts and prosecutors in Georgia have never been free from pressure from the authorities. If we talk specifically about the situation under the current government, it is very likely that the fate of Georgian democracy depends on the state of affairs in the Kremlin. That is, everything depends on the degree of subordination of the current shadow leader of the country, and along with it the entire political establishment, to Moscow. At present, logically, the degree of subordination is quite high. After all, no one really knows how Ivanishvili made his vast fortune (especially by Georgian standards) in Russia. But if little is known to the general public, it does not necessarily mean that the Kremlin knows nothing about it. Given all this, it is quite possible to suspect that the Kremlin has plenty of leverage.

For example, how to explain the fact that the project to build a deep-sea Black Sea port in Anaklia, which was compared to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan project in order of importance, has been completely failed? And the failure was such that the main lobbyists of this project, bankers Khazaradze and Japaridze, were prosecuted on totally absurd charges. And then it turned out that the Anaklia project was competing with an almost identical project in Novorossiysk.

There are several such examples that give us ground to conclude that the Kremlin controls Ivanishvili, and the oligarch, who has disappeared from the public sphere, in turn, controls the government he picked up. This is the situation with Georgian democracy.

- What was the impact of Saakashvili arrival on the country in 2021?

It is difficult to judge the expediency of Saakashvili's arrival before the 2021 municipal elections. Most likely, the ex-president's goal was to galvanize his supporters, some of whom, it is no secret, give the cold shoulder to the current leaders of the United National Movement: "Aren't the new leaders going to usurp Misha's legacy?".

Saakashvili has repeatedly urged his followers to vote for the United National Movement without a shadow of a doubt. However, it is also possible that his arrival may have contributed to the mobilization of Saakashvili's opponents, first of all those in power, who are not in a hurry, having started the propaganda machine at full power and using all the legal or illegal means at their disposal.

What reasons do "GMs" have for their hatred of the former president is a special question. There are several such reasons: first of all a strong discomfort created by Misha for corruption schemes, and in general the mentality, which has been forming for decades, in a certain part of the society. Some would say that when fighting endemic corruption, Misha acted too harshly and that his authoritarian style of government was going over the edge. But given the scale of bribery at the time he led the country, it was hardly possible to remedy the situation by any intelligent means. The same Mustafa Kemal was hardly a model of liberality in building a completely new type of country.

And the second point is the totally unprecedented disinformation campaign (if only comparable with the attempts to smear Georgia's first president Zviad Gamakhurdia through speculation and gossip in the early 1990s), directed against Saakashvili. Usually, the Kremlin media set the tone for this campaign and local anti-Saakashvilians were on the sidelines, portraying the then president as an evil spirit. Now it is interesting to observe how the current justice system charges Saakashvili with inappropriate expenditures, such as the purchase of five suits and one coat from budget funds, as well as the purchase and laying of mourning wreaths on the graves of Vaclav Havel and Lech Kaczynski.

The question of the impact on the country's political processes after Saakashvili's arrival has yet to be determined, but again, taking into account the degree of dependence of the current authorities on the Kremlin and the fact that Moscow strongly dislikes the former Georgian president, one can assume that Saakashvili's period of imprisonment depends not so much on internal but rather on external, geopolitical factors.

 What important events have taken place in Georgia over the past two years?

Directly or indirectly, the most important recent event is undoubtedly the war in Ukraine. The outcome of this war, where a large number of Georgian citizens are fighting alongside Ukrainian defenders of the homeland, will directly affect both Georgia's internal development and its geopolitical orientation.

The informal ruler of the country Ivanishvili has been playing a double game for about a decade now. On one hand, he makes every effort not to anger Moscow; on the other hand, he signs "The Association Agreement" with the European Union out of fear of alerting Western leaders.

The same happens in relation to the Ukrainian events: on the one hand, Georgia votes for resolutions at the UN condemning Russian aggression, while on the other hand, its government, not joining the sanctions against the Kremlin, distances itself in every way from the Zelensky government. There are ministers and parliamentarians visiting the evacuated Ukrainian citizens in Georgia, and then the chairman of the parliament Papuashvili rejects the offer of his colleague from Kyiv to visit the site of the tragedy in Bucha.

The biting words against Ukrainian authorities have been particularly frequent in recent weeks - they say that they failed to save the country from war and that their advisers are "nationalists", i.e. supporters of the United National Movement (two high-ranking figures of Georgian origin - Arahamia and Lordkipanidze). But that's not surprising since the entire ideology of the Georgian Dream party is built not only on the "displeasure" of the Kremlin but on the pointlessness of the resistance against Russia ("madman and adventurer Saakashvili dragged the country into a war"). And in general, the form of government built by Moscow is much closer and clearer to "GM" than the standards in force in Western countries.

- What does Georgian society think about joining NATO and the EU?

Despite weak diplomacy (according to the story of former Defense Minister Khidasheli, Ivanishvili once told his ministers: "Our position is to be as quiet as a lamb") and suspicions of covert support for pro-Russian organizations, the desire of the Georgian population to integrate into the EU and NATO is steadily high. According to a January 2020 NDI poll, 82% of Georgians want their country to be part of the European Union and 74% support the idea of aspiring to NATO membership. Although it is clear that the successful completion of the process of integration into Euro-Atlantic structures depends on the above-mentioned geopolitical factors.  

Caliber.Az