Filenews 6 September 2024 - by Melik Kaylan
The upcoming parliamentary elections in Georgia are set for October 26 and the country is already in turmoil.
In the coming weeks, the riots will be constant, while there is expected to be a crackdown on freedom of speech and repressive measures by the country's political leadership. There was a time when the West paid great attention to developments in Georgian democracy. When its former president, Mikheil Saakashvili, a pro-American-pro-European leader, was touring the Western world trying to attract interest in his country. Today he is a political prisoner. During his tenure, Georgia was repeatedly praised as one of the states that provided the greatest facilities for entrepreneurship. Since late 2012 and at times, the pro-Russian Bidzina Ivanishvili – Georgia's richest citizen – has drugged the national consciousness of the people. Usually, pulling the strings and controlling developments in the ruling Georgian Dream party.
Why do the internal affairs of a small isolated state (with a population of less than 4 million) matter to the rest of the world? Because it was from there that Putin found the courage to attack Ukraine later on and give Moscow a hegemonic role over the states that make up its lost empire. The spark was lit in Georgia, where the Russian invasion was treated very lightly by Western allies. And the fire could be extinguished in Georgia if the West corrected past mistakes and focused on retuning Tbilisi to it – something its citizens want.
As a journalist, I covered President Bush's visit to Tbilisi in 2005 for the Wall Street Journal. I also covered the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 for the WSJ, and wrote many articles at the time—and later—about the country. I covered the 2012 national election for Newsweek, elections like – to put it bluntly – the West was defeated when Saakashvili lost to oligarch Ivanishvili. I saw first hand how Moscow managed to interfere in those elections in a whole host of unfair ways. And in this column I've been mentioning all this for years. (While I was interviewing ministers and other officials, one of them received a message from the pro-Russian camp saying that if you win and we lose, we will say there was fraud at the polls.) It was the beginning of the disinformation and destabilization campaigns that Putin organized throughout the Western world. The era of Merkel, Sarkozy and "Rosneft" Schröder. All this, as we now understand, led to the horror that now reigns in Ukraine.
Suddenly the West has an opportunity, which it did not deserve, to turn the tide in Georgia through the upcoming elections. All he has to do is defend the right of the electorate in Georgia to choose the future they want, after so many years of frustrations. But, as usual, this is not the most likely scenario. Moscow has already put forward its plan. He warned that the US was preparing a "colour revolution" in Georgia. Think about it. Why would the Kremlin do this? Answer: Because there will be civil unrest when the pro-Russian party loses the election (currently polling at 19%) and refuses to accept defeat. They own the judiciary. They are already shouting that this will be the last normal election. (Does it remind you of anything?) The ruling party's strategy is to turn Georgia into a "second" Belarus – it has already openly expressed its intention to prosecute and ban the opposition. Already the rulers have caused a stir by passing the "Putin-cut" bill for foreign agents, which bans all foreign NGOs. They even bribe the electorate by creating massively false jobs in the Georgian countryside. There have also been incidents of bribery in previous elections, with the richest oligarch Ivanishvili siding with the ruling Georgian Dream party.
What the Georgian opposition fears is a Moscow-born KGB protocol to end a Western-style democracy. Starting with stopping Georgia's accession to the EU – an ambitious plan advocated by a majority of Georgians. And Moscow hopes the West will remain compliant in defending democracy in Georgia because the West has its own problems created by the Kremlin: such as East German parties that support Moscow. Typical is an article in Politico about their growing influence titled "Putin's Next Coup.". In fact, the scenario wants to exploit the terms of democracy in the West to suppress it. We will surely hear complaints from the "usual" voices that the West should not "encircle" or threaten Russia, in Georgia as in Ukraine, the same voices that justify the invasion of Ukraine by invoking the fictitious guarantees once given to the Kremlin that Russia's hegemony will remain intact. In addition to the moral misery of condemning millions of people to their enslavement in an "empire," there is another worrying element that concerns us all: the Kremlin is undermining Western democracy.
