Georgia prepares for an all-against-one election

https://eurasianet.org

In a bit of historic irony, powerful oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili has managed to inspire rare unity across Georgia’s cacophonous political scene twice in his life. His money and influence forged the broad-based consolidation of opposition forces that brought him to power in 2012, and now, 12 years and three electoral cycles later, a similar pattern of opposition convergence could send him packing.

Assorted groups, factions and personalities that make up the Georgian opposition have agglutinated into a handful of electoral alliances to take on Ivanishvili’s incumbent Georgian Dream party in the October 26 parliamentary polls. The outcome will likely determine Georgia’s geopolitical orientation and governance structure for years to come. 

There is strength in numbers for Georgia’s many-headed opposition: without consolidation, most opposition parties would have struggled to independently clear the voting threshold required to earn representation in the legislature. Under Georgia’s electoral system, parties rather than individual candidates are on ballot, and a party or bloc needs a greater than a 5 percent share of the vote to gain seats. 

Corralling support bases by merging into coalitions thus represents a recipe for opposition success. “Bigger is going to mean more opposition parties getting across the threshold,” Dustin Gilbreath, a longtime analyst of polling data in the Caucasus, told Eurasianet.

In the build-up to the election, President Salome Zourabichvili acted as the main bonding agent within the nation’s atomized political scene. Once Ivanishvili’s protégé, now a vocal critic, the largely figurehead president has actively mediated among various groups and leaders, pushing them to forge coalitions.

With her prodding, the opposition has thus coalesced into four major groupings. On their own, none of these groups is expected to outperform Georgian Dream, but, as long as they all send representatives to parliament following the elections, they can potentially form a coalition government and throw Georgian Dream off its leading perch.

Giorgi Gakharia’s Party

One of these groups is led by another Ivanishvili former loyalist-turned-foe, ex-prime minister Giorgi Gakharia. A Moscow-educated business administrator, Gakharia hopped around cabinet positions until he broke ranks with Georgian Dream in 2021 and launched a political party of his own, For Georgia. Charismatic as much as he is controversial, Gakharia caters to voters weary of both Georgian Dream and its longtime archrival, United National Movement (UNM).

Gakharia styles his group as a third alternative on the political scene long dominated by the rivalry between kotsi and natsi – colloquial shorthand for Georgian Dream and UNM respectively – and the towering figures behind them, Ivanishvili and ex-president Mikhail Saakashvili. Gakharia however is hamstrung by his own past actions, such as the violent crackdown on demonstrations that took place on his watch as the interior minister in 2019. 

Khazaradze and Co.

Competing for more or less the same slice of the electorate is another group, led by Mamuka Khazaradze, the leader of Lelo for Georgia. Georgia’s best-known banker, Khazaradze waded into politics after Ivanishvili’s government allegedly robbed him of his mega-project to build the nation’s first-ever deep-sea port.

To gain a few extra pounds of electoral heft, Khazaradze’s group took in a couple of smaller political entities, and together they formed an alliance, Strong Georgia. His relatively deep pockets allows Khazaradze to run a sleek campaign, but his successful career as a financier is also an obstacle: a wide swath of the electorate harbors a grudge toward credit institutions in the cash-strapped country, where lots of households are saddled with bank debts.

President Zourabichvili tried to arrange an electoral marriage between Khazaradze’s and Gakharia’s forces. Combined, “they potentially could’ve been the largest opposition party or, if not, decisive in creating a governing coalition,” Gilbreath said, though cautioned that different opinion polls paint different pictures.

But the two men bickered at their last meeting hosted by President Zourabichvili and opted to contest the vote separately. 

Unity Coalition and Coalition for Change 

Separately, both the Khazaradze and Gakharia groups fall behind Unity, a coalition led by the UNM, as the strongest opposition group, according to most polls. That means if Khazaradze’s and Gakharia’s forces fail to nab meaningful presence in the parliament, Georgia could be in for another four years of the natsi-kotsi divide. 

Another electoral grouping expected to clear the barrier is the Coalition for Change. This coalition also tries to style itself as a UNM alternative, but it includes well-known former UNM figures along with libertarian elements, and many voters may not be sold on the distinction between this coalition and the UNM.

Unclear Picture

When it comes to pre-election opinion polls in Georgia, the adage – he who pays the pollster calls the tune – seems to apply. A survey commissioned by Imedi TV, a Georgian Dream mouthpiece, put support for Georgian Dream at almost 60 percent. A survey commissioned by opposition-minded Formula TV put that figure at just over 32 percent. 

As they recycle and juxtapose various survey data, independent analysts believe that between the two results the latter is a more accurate gauge of popular support for the incumbent, but they also say that hardly any survey can offer reliable predictions of the voting outcome.

By looking at a variety of data, Gilbreath says that there is a sizable segment of undecided or persuadable voters. “This group can break either way and includes a very large share of people who are unlikely to ultimately vote,” he said.

Further confounding the picture, Georgian Dream’s ominous threats toward opposition and election watchdogs create fears of potential plans to rig the voting outcome. 

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