The news that came out of Georgia late on Saturday was as saddening as it was predictable. For weeks, the country’s ruling party, the Russia-aligned Georgian Dream (GD), were advertising that they saw no alternative to staying in power following the rigged parliamentary election – promising a ban on opposition parties and even ‘Nuremberg trials’.
If there is any surprise at all, it is the sheer brazenness with which GD tilted the results in its favour. There were widespread violations of vote secrecy, including tracking voters outside polling stations, verbal threats and violence. There is evidence of vote buying, duplicitous use of ID cards, marking of ballots (making votes for parties other than GD invalid), and intimidation of civil servants, teachers, cleaners – and essentially anybody on government payroll. Results coming from remote, poor areas with large minority populations seem akin to something out of North Korea: GD received 89 per cent of votes in Akhalkalaki, 80 percent in Marneuli, and 84 in Sachkhere, suggesting blatant manipulation.
The time to act was before the election
None of the four opposition party blocs – which would command a comfortable parliamentary majority according to much of the polling pre-election as well as independent exit polls on Saturday – have accepted the results of the election as legitimate. Ten chairs of foreign affairs committees of European (and Canadian) parliaments, including the Bundestag, have called on the EU not to recognise the results either and to respond with sanctions.
There will be surely some sanctions – as well as domestic protests. But Georgians spent weeks protesting the Russian-style foreign agents law adopted by GD this spring to no avail. Will they take back to streets with the same vigour and persistence, knowing that the regime is unlikely to budge – especially on a matter as important as its own survival?
With steady Russian advances in Ukraine and Putin playing host to the leaders of the BRICS countries as well as the disgraced secretary general of the United Nations, it is not unreasonable for the GD to think they can get away with their election fraud and perhaps with a violent crackdown on pesky dissenters and civil society activists too. Already on Saturday, a group of thugs tried to storm the headquarters of the United National Movement, the party of former president Mikheil Saakashvili – one of the many violent incidents recorded on that day.
Needless to say, on Georgia the West is asleep at the wheel. On Sunday, the EU foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell issued a bizarre statement praising the election as ‘procedurally well-organised’ but ‘marked by a tense environment’. Later that evening, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken also issued a weak condemnation of the elections, calling on Georgia’s leaders to ‘respect the rule of law’.
There will certainly be finger wagging in the coming days, as well as sanctions – but not much else. With the US election about to reach its climax, Georgia may as well not exist. In Brussels, all eyes are fixed on the glacial transfer of power between the old and the new European Commission and the looming hearings of new commissioners, including Mr Borrell’s successor. For the Labour Foreign Secretary David Lammy, meanwhile, the political pay-off from preening over Israel’s real or imagined transgressions far exceeds spending any attention on a small, distant country about which we know little.
To be completely fair, there is not much that Messrs Blinken, Borrell, or Lammy can reasonably be expected to do now that would likely make any difference. The time to act was before the election, when it was still possible to remind Georgians that the choice facing them was binary and existential: that there was no path to Western integration while being governed by GD. It was also possible to threaten GD with real pain if they attempted the sort of shenanigans seen this weekend. While the relevant actors should still face consequences for their actions – most importantly by being banned from ever setting foot, or parking their assets, in the West again – anything that the United States and its allies do now will be too little, too late.
Again, it did not have to be this way. Anyone who had paid any attention to Georgia recognised that the GD could seize the election as an opportunity to entrench itself in power and possibly end any prospect of a pluralistic, multiparty democracy in the country.
An incurable optimist may hope that the likely end of Georgia’s inspiring though vulnerable experiment with democracy is a useful, necessary wake-up call on the West’s declining ability and willingness to shape political outcomes in ways that are aligned with our interests and values. Experience with a long procession of previous supposed wake-up calls from across the world, however, suggests that this one will fall on deaf ears too.