Georgia's ruling party said it would move to impeach the country's vocally pro-EU president on Sept. 1, in the latest sign of the country's dimming prospects for Western integration — and probably the best illustration yet of how the country's complex domestic politics complicate predictions of Georgia's geopolitical trajectory.
Georgian Dream (GD) party leader Irakli Kobakhidze said President Salome Zourabichvili had violated the country's constitution by taking trips to EU countries without the government's approval. Kobakhidze also claimed her statements that the Georgian parliament and government were only superficially fulfilling the European Union's requirements in order to get EU candidate status (which is true), and that this would jeopardize Georgia receiving the status (which is likely also true). But GD's move to impeach her will likely only make it worse — demonstrating the ruling party's ultimate disinterest in receiving EU candidate status unless it gets credit, with GD instead more interested in leveraging domestic debates over the issue to polarize the Georgian electorate for its own political benefit.
Georgia's Western Ambitions vs. its Anti-Western Actions and Rhetoric
Of all of the states in Eurasia, Georgia is likely the country with the most inscrutable geopolitical trajectory. It may seem counterintuitive to doubt the country's course toward EU and NATO integration, given that Georgia just hosted the Agile Spirit 2023 NATO exercise on its territory from Aug. 21 to Sept. 1. Support for EU membership in the country also regularly polls above 80%. And Russia occupies 20% of Georgia's internationally-recognized territory, which fuels widespread anti-Russian sentiment. In fact, similar to Ukraine, Georgia's constitution mandates that Tbilisi retain a course toward the European Union and NATO membership.
Amid these domestic political and geopolitical imperatives, it would appear that the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party is not in a position to significantly alter its policy course of Western integration. But at the same time, Euro-Atlantic integration and strong relations with Europe and the United States seem to fly in the face of the current Georgian government's actions. Tbilisi has abstained from joining anti-Russian sanctions, instead promoting Russian narratives that NATO expansion was the reason for Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It has massively increased its trade turnover with Russia since the latter's invasion and is openly exploring deeper economic cooperation with Russia and, more recently, China. And these moves, along with a steady dose of critical and inflammatory rhetoric against Western governments and officials, have begun to wreak havoc on Georgia's relations with the United States and the European Union.
The reason for the disconnect between Georgia's formal pro-Western course and its government's classic geopolitical balancing — which in practice means balancing away from the West — ultimately lies in the country's opaque and dysfunctional domestic politics. Nevertheless, recent mass protests over a Russia-inspired ''foreign agents'' law that ultimately led to the bill's withdrawal demonstrated how Western criticism and domestic backlash continue to constrain Tbilisi's policies and irreconcilable political course.
Unraveling the drivers of Tbilisi's sometimes contradictory foreign policy requires understanding that changes in recent years are not related to the ruling GD party's domestic or foreign policy course — which has essentially remained the same for the past decade — but are instead the result of the changing international and domestic political landscape that the government is operating in.
The Divides Behind Georgia's Balancing Act
Georgia has been engulfed in a prolonged political crisis that began with the contested October 2020 parliamentary election, in which GD preserved its near complete stranglehold of political power in the country despite widespread protests over accusations of fraud and manipulation. While an EU-brokered power-sharing agreement initially appeared capable of enabling an air of normality, the GD party annulled the deal in July 2021, which has since seen the country's opposition partially boycott parliament.
Georgia's highly polarized domestic politics stem from the public disenchantment with the more definitively pro-Western foreign policy course of former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who pursued reforms when he and his allies came to power in the 2003 Rose Revolution. However, they severely discredited themselves in the controversial and disastrous loss to Russia in the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, creating a sense of disenchantment that ultimately paved the way for GD's electoral victory in 2012.
After entering office, GD continued to pursue the country's goal of Euro-Atlantic integration, the overwhelmingly popular policy of its predecessors. But the party also promptly allowed court cases against Saakashvili to move forward, quickly forcing him out of the country for fear of arrest, thereby pleasing Moscow in the process. Upon his return to Georgia in 2021, Saakashvili was immediately arrested, is currently standing trial for a number of alleged crimes, and is in poor health from numerous hunger strikes.
In fact, over the past decade, GD has repeatedly attested that the previous government's confrontational approach to Russia was imbalanced and ultimately led to the disastrous 2008 war with Russia. Therefore, despite maintaining the pro-Western course, being soft on Russia is a contradiction inherently tied to GD's very foundation.
GD's first prime minister, the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, was the initial architect of the party's more Russia-friendly policy. Ivanishvili's personal wealth — estimated at around $6 billion — has for the past decade been roughly equivalent to about one-third of the country's GDP. He's believed to still wield immense influence over Georgian foreign and domestic policy, and his proclivity for Russia makes sense, given that he is believed to be the beneficial owner of a business empire with significant ties to Russia and the Russian government. Ivanishvili's close connections with Russia also partly explain the dissonance between his party's foreign policy and Georgians' public opinion. Ivanishvili quickly resumed trade relations with Russia, which were frozen shortly before the 2008 war, starting Georgia's geopolitical balancing approach that continues to this day.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has since created new opportunities for Georgia's balancing strategy. The country has become a sanctions-busting destination for dual-use goods and other re-exports to Russia of sanctioned material. Georgia has also replaced Western exports to Russia in key sectors like wine products; in the first half of 2023, Russia's wine imports from Georgia rose by 63% year-on-year, allowing Georgia to overtake Italy to become Russia's top supplier of non-sparkling wines despite its much smaller size. The subsequent rise in transit trade both to Russia and bypassing Russia, as well as an increased flow of migrants from Russia and foreign direct investment from abroad, have stimulated domestic demand, with Georgia's economy growing an astounding 10% last year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Over the past decade, Russia has sought to establish a structure to reward Tbilisi's ''pragmatic'' foreign policy under GD. During the initial years of the party's reign, one of Moscow's main ''concessions'' was holding back on the de jure annexation of breakaway regions it fully occupied as a result of the 2008 war, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But as Georgia's dependence on Russia grew and as Tbilisi boldly demonstrated its differences with the West, Moscow has more recently sought to fortify GD's Western-skeptic approach by sweetening Tbilisi's incentive to maintain its balancing strategy.
In May 2023, Russian President Vladimir Putin restored visa-free access for Georgians to Russia after a 23-year break, and also scrapped a four-year ban on direct flights between the two countries that was imposed after anti-GD and -Kremlin protests broke out in Tbilisi in 2019. Georgia's pro-Western but largely ceremonial president, Salome Zurabishvili, called Moscow's measures unacceptable, inappropriate and untimely. Her disapproval mirrored the opinion of the Georgian intelligentsia, who argue that Russia's invasion of Ukraine motivates the country to break harder from Russia on both strategic and moral grounds. However, Georgian Foreign Minister Ilya Darchiashvili welcomed Moscow's moves and dismissed Western officials' statements that direct flights could result in the extension of international sanctions against Russia to Georgia and that the simplified travel regime ran counter to the spirit of Georgia's EU integration aspirations. The conflicting domestic reactions to Moscow's unexpected ''goodwill gestures'' revealed the extent to which Georgia's foreign policy course is so deeply interlinked with its domestic politics.
During Zurabishvil's address to the European Parliament on May 31, she argued that if the country was not given EU candidate status and an integration window, this would essentially be a death sentence for Georgian democracy. She argued that anti-Western, illiberal forces in the country would take advantage of the frustration to proclaim that the ''European perspective'' for the country never existed in the first place.
And therein lies the Catch-22 that has long entrapped Georgia and other countries affixed between Europe and Russia: The European Union won't offer an actual door for real and rapid integration in the near future because many member states doubt Tbilisi's current government and elite — similar to those of Ukraine in the past — are truly willing to implement the structural reforms to fight corruption and uphold the rule of law to meet the bloc's high threshold of membership acceptability. The European Union is also critical as to whether Georgia will cease playing both sides to obtain strategic gains. Meanwhile, Tbilisi refuses to disavow its pro-Western course because it provides benefits and is a domestic imperative, yet does not seek substantive reforms or dispense with its geopolitical balancing because it's not in GD's interest. In what amounts to a vicious cycle, Tbilisi is growing further disillusioned with its own prospects and the sincerity of the European Union's integration offer.
GD politicians have been able to keep the ''dream'' of EU and NATO membership alive in Georgia, while simultaneously bashing the Western governments through a combination of artful allusions to the above paradox. The GD-led government has also made false claims about the previous government in an effort to use its successor as a scapegoat for Georgia's dim Euro-Atlantic prospects and sow doubt among Georgians about the West's commitment to their country. Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili has decried the hypocrisy of the international community's failure to take meaningful action against Moscow, including by imposing sanctions, during Georgia's 2008 war with Russia. But he's also argued that sanctioning Russia would devastate Georgia's economy — pointing to the fact that Russia emerged as Georgia's second-largest trading partner by imports and its third-largest trading partner by exports in 2022 amid the war in Ukraine — while the West would do nothing to compensate Georgia for any losses.
The Sustainability of Balancing and the China Factor
Opportunities to further benefit from economic integration with Russia remain open. One example of this would be the opportunity for Georgian roads and railways to capitalize on growing Russian north-south trade with Armenia and Iran, particularly the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas for shipment onward to Asia. Georgia's only rail link with Russia through Abkhazia has been closed since 2008, which has caused more Russian goods to flow directly to Turkey via the Black Sea and to Azerbaijan. Moreover, as long as ships are not subject to sanctions, an increase in Russo-Georgian maritime commerce is possible.
So far, the West hasn't responded with retaliatory measures that would incentivize Tbilisi to reduce cooperation with Moscow. Total U.S. financial assistance for Georgia has trended downward since GD took power in 2012. Though the U.S. Congress has considered withholding foreign aid to Georgia if it is determined that the Georgian government is not taking sufficient steps to strengthen democratic institutions and fight corruption, the U.S. has yet to take major steps to curtail its support for Georgia.
All this seems to suggest that the West is still very reluctant to coerce Georgia into tighter alignment or domestic reforms by cutting support or increasing costs — instead merely delaying deeper cooperation. The ruling GD party, therefore, has calculated that the optimal path forward is a sluggish pace of domestic and institutional reforms, and that a faster pace could endanger its domestic stranglehold on power while a slower pace is unlikely to prompt mass protests or reduced Western trade and cooperation.
The West has long viewed Georgia's tepid approach to reforms as evidence that the country's ''balanced'' foreign policy trades the long-term benefits of European integration for the short-term benefits of Russian integration. However, Russia's continued stability despite its ongoing war in Ukraine and China's increasingly important role in the South Caucasus contradict or, at minimum, significantly complicate this picture. Specifically, China's increasing presence in the region will make Georgia even more willing to forgo the benefits of long-term cooperation with Europe in favor of the increasingly alluring option of Chinese and Russian cooperation. The carrots that Russia and China will continue to offer Georgia will increase Tbilisi's leverage vis-a-vis the West and make the GD government more likely to risk domestic and international backlash by exploring deeper ties with Beijing and Moscow, along with other BRICS members and regional powers.
Indeed, on June 28, Georgian Prime Minister Garibashvili traveled to China to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and inaugurate a new strategic partnership aimed at elevating relations between their countries to a fundamentally ''new stage.'' The other main topic of discussion during Garibashvili's trip was related to the redirection of east-west trade between China and Europe from Russia to the Middle Corridor route, thus bypassing Russia.
Despite its apparent benefits, Georgia's China policy could backfire on the GD government, as NATO and the European Union are unlikely to look favorably on a growing Chinese presence in the Black Sea region. Beijing, for its part, is unlikely to take such a partnership seriously unless Georgia is willing to have robust diplomatic contacts and trade relations with Moscow, as Ivanishvili himself promised to do in 2012, despite having fiercely opposed Russia's occupation of its territory.
China — which has invested heavily in Georgian infrastructure projects, including through the Belt and Road Initiative — has an interest in preventing Georgia from taking its investment dollars while nevertheless siding with the West. But Beijing likely also sees post-Soviet countries distancing themselves from Russia as risky bets.
In this context, a bellwether for Georgia's geopolitical trajectory will emerge in October, when the government is expected to announce which company will be awarded to build the country's first deep-water container port in Anaklia. European and Chinese companies are competing for the project, and Georgia's selection will strongly signal where Tbilisi feels its interests are best served.
European leaders will also reportedly discuss the future of the European Union's enlargement policy during a European Political Community meeting in October. While the meeting is not expected to yield concrete announcements, Brussels could offer Georgia the candidate status later this year in hopes that it will not fall too far behind Moldova and Ukraine, its Association Trio partners. Announcing Georgia's candidacy, however, would be merely symbolic as it would not have a concrete effect on the country's actual membership, which remains many years away, should it ever come to pass.
A High-Stakes Election in 2024
GD's geopolitical balancing strategy is politically polarizing, which means that the future of the country's foreign policy ultimately lies in domestic politics. The stakes of Georgia's next parliamentary election — scheduled for late October 2024 — are thus sky-high, which is further underscored by the government's recent attempts to situate itself with an international illiberal movement to help stay in power.
Fundamentally, GD's primary goal is to stay in power — not to successfully conduct Euro-Atlantic integration, which would risk eroding the GD's power by a priori entailing a more competitive and less polarized political climate in Georgia. While domestic and international perceptions of democratic backsliding in Georgia grow with each passing year, polarization and corruption will continue because both serve to benefit the country's ruling party. GD will try to defuse international and domestic backlash over this by framing them as normal — with Hungary and the United States being the party's preferred examples. That is why the Georgian government has become increasingly open in its view of Viktor Orban's Hungary as a model. Therefore, GD's goal can be understood as turning Georgia into a sort of Hungary of the South Caucasus — formally tied to the West via membership in key organizations, but headed by an illiberal government aligned with the fringe political movements in the West and supporting ties with the autocratic governments in China and Russia.
In 2022, the far-right People's Power party split off from GD to pressure it from the right, somewhat mirroring Jobbik's relationship with the ruling Fidesz party in Hungary. This new threat saw Georgian Prime Minister Garibashvili attend the Conservative Political Action Conference for the first time in May 2023, which was itself for the first time held in Europe in Budapest. During the conference, Garibashvili hailed his Hungarian counterpart Orban as a ''wise, visionary national leader.'' This drew condemnation from the Party of European Socialists (PES) with which GD had been aligned, which then prompted GD to preemptively leave the alliance days later without waiting for its expulsion.
There are three main scenarios that could result from the 2024 election. Arguably the most likely scenario is one where GD wins another term, albeit likely by a smaller margin than last time. The party's re-election would likely see a brief period of protests, but would somewhat bolster domestic stability and Georgia's geopolitical balancing on the global stage. Under this scenario, pushback from Georgian protesters and Western governments would limit Tbilisi's ability to significantly deepen its ties with Beijing and Moscow, as well as its ability to significantly ramp up its efforts to suppress domestic dissent and undermine Georgia's democratic institutions. Instead, GD would likely opt for a less confrontational approach in pursuing its foreign and domestic ambitions. This would likely enable the country to reap the greatest mid-term economic benefits of balancing, but political instability could persist, particularly if the economy underperforms.
In a second scenario, the GD could win re-election by a sweeping margin, emboldening the party to become more illiberal, further suppress the opposition and deepen relations with Russia and China due to a lack of concern over domestic or Western backlash. The United States and the European Union would likely retaliate against Tbilisi by reducing support programs and even imposing sanctions. But GD would exercise strategic patience and wait for Western politicians willing to argue for increased cooperation with the current Georgian government in hopes of reversing Tbilisi's course with carrots rather than sticks.
In the third and final scenario, a genuinely pro-Western government could assume power, either by winning the election outright or by gaining enough seats to destabilize the current GD-led government and eventually assume power following mass protests. Such a government would seek to reduce Russian influence and take much more concrete and sincere action toward Western integration. But reforms would remain difficult, and powerful vested political and economic interests in Georgia not wanting to see their influence fall could seek to sabotage the economy and foment unrest, endangering the country's short-term stability all the same.
In any case, the high stakes of the 2024 vote set the stage for a highly contested election that will be accompanied by mass street protests, as well as increasingly radical acts of dissent. As pro-Western Georgians opposed to the government increasingly feel that their votes cannot make a difference, widespread unrest appears set to remain the only method to stop unwanted government action both at home and abroad. If protests do not materialize, the GD government will continue to further invest in Georgia's geopolitical balancing strategy, precisely because the lack of domestic constraints means its long-term viability is stronger than ever.
