On a Saturday evening in late June, I walked across central Tbilisi to meet some friends for dinner. I was visiting from Milan, and I couldn’t help feeling uneasy, aware that the government had recently passed a “foreign influence” law, which sparked huge protests followed by a violent crackdown. The Georgian capital, where I lived for three years, is a low-slung city, and as I dodged tourists in the street, I kept catching sight of a steel-and-glass villa perched high on a hill. The house belongs to Bidzina Ivanishvili, an oligarch who made his fortune in Russia and founded Georgian Dream, a populist, socially conservative party that has been in power since 2012. Outside Parliament, a small cluster of policemen were dawdling on the sidewalk. The only sign of the tens of thousands of Georgians who had gathered here in protest in April and May were a few patches of graffiti still smudging the building’s orange walls.
The new law, which was first proposed as the “foreign agent” law and is still often referred to that way, requires organizations that receive more than twenty per cent of their funding from foreign sources to register on a government database. It has also been dubbed “the Russian law” because it resembles one that Vladimir Putin first passed in Russia in 2012, which was then used to target N.G.O.s and media organizations. In Russia, the “foreign agent” designation created confusion between criminal conduct and legal activity. Similarly, Georgia’s law, which has since been rebranded as the “law on transparency of foreign influence,” could also stigmatize N.G.Os while giving the Ministry of Justice increased power to surveil them. “It’s not about anything other than insuring transparency,” Maka Botchorishvili, a Georgian Dream M.P., told me. Not everyone agrees. In 2023, the Georgian government withdrew an almost identical bill after it led to three nights of protests and a statement from the European Commission in Brussels, suggesting that passing the law would jeopardize Georgia’s accession to the European Union. Georgia did receive European Union candidate status last December, and Parliament reintroduced the bill a few months later. And then, despite widespread opposition—according to one estimate, on a single day in May there were three hundred thousand protesters out in the streets, approximately a tenth of the country’s population—it quickly became law, stoking fears in this nascent democracy of a decisive turn toward Russia and authoritarianism.
On April 29th, Ivanishvili, who some analysts believe has been guiding government policy from behind the scenes, made a rare public appearance. In a somewhat frenzied speech, he stood by the foreign-influence law and repeated a conspiracy theory about a “global party of war” wanting to drag Georgia into confrontation with Moscow, saying “their only goal is to deprive Georgia of its state sovereignty.” Last year, Ivanishvili was made “Honorary Chair” of Georgian Dream. “I would not say that he’s engaged in party activities on a daily basis, but, as an honorary chairman, he is quite influential,” Botchorishvili said. A number of his close associates have been appointed to key government positions, including his former personal bodyguard Vakhtang Gomelauri, who is now Minister of Internal Affairs. Among Brussels’s twelve conditions for Georgia’s E.U. accession was “de-oligarchisation.”
Not long after the “foreign-influence” law was passed, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said, “We support any initiatives that are in line with Russian-Georgian normalization.” The U.S. responded to the law with sanctions against high-level Georgian officials for “undermining democracy in Georgia,” as a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department put it, and in early July the E.U. announced that it is pausing Georgia’s E.U. accession process. Euro-Atlantic integration has been an objective enshrined in Georgia’s constitution since 2018, one that eighty-two per cent of Georgians continue to support. As I walked toward the restaurant, I saw E.U. flags everywhere, stuck in shop windows and waving from balconies and car antennas.
In the weeks following the protests, opposition figures, including Zuka Berdzenishvili, an activist and the son of a leader of the Republican Party, and Boris Kurua, from the Girchi Party, were beaten by men outside their homes. Investigative journalists and activists had their property vandalized; posters pinned around the city called many of them agents “sold for money.” Even some parents and family members of protesters were targeted. Giorgi Tabagari, a civil activist and the former director of Tbilisi Pride, reported that posters of him with the words “Corrupter of youngsters” were pinned outside his father’s home. And then in June, a new set of bills, echoing the Kremlin’s notorious law curbing L.G.B.T. rights and banning “gay propaganda,” passed a preliminary reading in Parliament.
“I feel scared, like we’re standing at the edge of a cliff,” Nino Kupatadze, a friend and forty-seven-year-old management consultant, told me over dinner that June evening. We were at Elene Dariani, a restaurant named after the pseudonym of a Georgian poet in the lively historic neighborhood of Sololaki. Kupatadze spent several nights protesting the foreign-influence law with her friends, and as we picked over a tomato salad and shkmeruli, chicken in a creamy garlic sauce, we talked about the upcoming parliamentary elections in October. “Another term of Georgian Dream and the repressions will be worse,” she said. “We will lose the West.” By the time we left the restaurant, it was full of people. The evening seemed to reflect life in Georgia since May: an ordinary, convivial atmosphere limned by anxiety over what lies ahead.
October’s high-stakes election will determine whether Georgian Dream will win a fourth term or be replaced by one or more of the country’s opposition parties. Campaigners across the political spectrum have begun swapping out the word “election” for “referendum” to describe the options voters face. “This is a choice between the West and Russia,” Elene Khoshtaria, one of the leaders of Droa, meaning “It’s Time,” a liberal, pro-Western opposition party, told me.
When the young political firebrand Mikheil Saakashvili became Georgia’s President after ousting Georgia’s seventy-five-year-old President Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Foreign Minister, in what is now known as the 2003 Rose Revolution, he inherited a failing state with few functioning institutions and rampant corruption. In Saakashvili’s first term, he overhauled Georgia’s notoriously corrupt police force, cut red tape for businesses, and launched a campaign of privatization. Georgia’s integration into NATO was the lodestar of Saakashvili’s foreign policy, and he soon became a favorite of the West. (He is known, in part, for naming a road connecting Tbilisi to the airport George W. Bush Street.) His second term, however, was marked by a growing authoritarianism and the disastrous Russian invasion of 2008, which ended with the separatist regions South Ossetia and Abkhazia coming under de-facto Russian control. His government cut diplomatic ties with Russia as a result. In 2012, Saakashvili’s party, United National Movement, lost to Georgian Dream. Many agree that Georgia has drifted away from the West ever since.
Georgian Dream has attracted voters in part by presenting itself as the only bulwark against the return of Saakashvili, who, after a brief stint in Ukraine, has languished in jail since 2021, after being convicted of abuses of power in office. Images of the former President and his allies with the words “No Natsebi,” referring to the nickname given to supporters of Saakashivili’s party, have appeared on billboards across Tbilisi during past elections. “Georgia is experiencing state capture,” Kornely Kakachia, the director of the independent Georgian Institute of Politics think tank, told me. “Georgian Dream, like previous governments, has monopolized power and they use administrative resources during elections.” (The Georgian M.P. Botchorishvili denied the latter claim, calling it “impossible.”) Their approach has depended on a fractured opposition and what analysts call “strategic ambiguity”—ostensibly courting the West while appeasing Russia.
After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, Georgian Dream was reluctant to join international sanctions against Russia, causing protests and fuelling speculation that Ivanishvili has maintained ties with Moscow. With Russian influence one of the few red lines that cuts across divisions in Georgia, for the first time in more than a decade opposition parties are making strong alliances. The passage of the foreign-influence law has been similarly galvanizing. “Parts of society who were fundamentally pro-European for years but supported the status quo . . . are now shifting,” Giga Bokeria, the former leader of the opposition party European Georgia, said.
Will this translate to change at the polls? Notoriously divided, Georgia’s opposition parties have previously struggled to successfully form a pre-election coalition, effectively splintering the opposition vote. It’s perhaps a testament to their intransigence that many of them aren’t even that far apart ideologically. So far, at least eight opposition parties, including Khoshtaria’s Droa, have announced three separate coalitions for the ballot. “If we fail to change the government, it means Georgia will become an isolated country,” Khoshtaria told me. “This is an existential vote.”
Luka Gviniashvili, a twenty-four-year-old Georgian with tousled chestnut hair, is a fast talker. On the afternoon I met him in central Tbilisi, he was glazed with sweat, a motorcycle helmet hanging from his arm. He had just been to the suburb of Dighomi to inspect a space for a possible new mushroom-farming business. Gviniashvili, who grew up partly in Paris, where his father used to play rugby and his mother once ran a perfume company, attended the recent protests and was there the night that riot police turned on protesters with water cannons, batons, and tear gas. “When I saw police running I tried to get away, but because of the water cannons I slipped on the grass and they pushed me to the ground,” he told me. Like many Georgians of his generation, he speaks fluent English; his is inflected with an American twang. “I was trying to cover my head and they were kicking me,” Gviniashvili said. “Their shields were formed in that Roman style, and they opened it and they dragged me in.” He was arrested that night.
The protests had a high youth turnout. After growing up in a political landscape dominated by Ivanishvili and Saakashvili, many young Georgians I spoke to seemed wary of figureheads. “That was one of the unique things,” Gviniashvili said, of the protests. “There was no single leader.”
In a recent poll, eighty-five per cent of young Georgians said that none of the political parties represent their interests. About a third of young people don’t vote in the first round of parliamentary elections. Shame Movement, a pro-E.U. activist organization, was formed in 2019 in the midst of widespread anti-government protests against a visiting Russian M.P. taking the speaker’s seat in the Georgian Parliament. “Our campaign message is essentially, go and vote, nothing more than that. We encourage civic participation,” Dachi Imedadze, Shame’s twenty-five-year-old campaign strategist, said. Shame is run by a nine-person board, and does not campaign for individual political parties, a fact that helps them to tap into a young voter base disillusioned by party politics. Imedadze said that the chronic distrust toward politicians among Georgians “has roots in the Soviet system.” He observed, “No one trusted anyone, not even family. Today, the level of engagement between parties and voters is so low.”
“I don’t want to see a single popular leader emerge,” Ana Tavadze, who is twenty-seven, told me over the phone. Tavadze is a project manager at Shame and at the queer, feminist multimedia platform GrlzWave. “Gen Z has complete distrust in anyone who says, ‘Let me be the one leader, let me be the one that unites us.’ Saakashvili was that messiah. Ivanishvili was that messiah. This mind-set has harmed Georgia,” she said. During our conversation, I was struck by the clarity of Tavadze’s vision but wondered how such idealism might be realized in a parliamentary system.
One morning, I walked past Tbilisi’s busy Marjanishvili metro station and saw posters bearing the faces of opposition politicians and civil activists with the words “traitors without homeland.” The mood of fear that’s permeated Tbilisi since spring has affected Shame. “I constantly look ahead and behind me as I walk. I carry pepper spray with me,” Giorgi Mjavanadze, Shame’s thirty-year-old director, told me. “I am now always on edge, expecting them to come for me at any moment.”
In the wake of Saakashvili’s Presidency, Georgian Dream significantly curtailed the executive powers of the President’s Office, effectively handing control to the Prime Minister and reducing the Presidency to a largely ceremonial position. President Salome Zourabichvili, who came to power with Georgian Dream’s endorsement in 2018, was initially dismissed by critics as a party stooge. Since the war in Ukraine began, however, she has become an outspoken critic of the government. The ruling party has noticed. In 2023, the government tried and failed to impeach Zourabichvili for “unauthorized” meetings with Western officials. In April, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze publicly denounced her as a traitor after she announced her support for the protesters. (She vetoed the foreign-influence law but was overruled by Parliament.)
In May, Zourabichvili created a largely symbolic action plan called the Georgian Charter, which prioritizes Georgia’s commitment to European integration. “When we vote for any party that has signed the charter,” Zourabichvili said, “we are effectively voting for the ‘Georgian Charter,’ and thus for a European future.” At least seventeen parties have signed it. Shame’s Tavadze, looking ahead to the October elections, called Zourabichvili “a situational ally”: “She knows the vote will decide where Georgia will be in this new reordered world.”
Not everyone in Georgian civil society is thinking that far ahead. Organizations that receive foreign funding will first need to get through August, when the law on “foreign influence” takes effect. So far, many organizations with foreign funding are bracing to defy its mandate to register, including Transparency International Georgia, which investigates corruption in the country. Eka Gigauri, its forty-six-year-old executive director, greeted me in her office in central Tbilisi. Hanging along the walls were framed course certificates from Stanford and Harvard’s Kennedy School, and a silk scarf with the word “freedom” printed in different languages. Foreign-funded organizations that refuse to register on the foreign-influence database will face fines and eventually be signed up anyway. Gigauri says they are prepared for the consequences of not complying, including the possibility that Transparency International, whose investigations have revealed that Ivanishvili owns at least one business in Russia, will be shut down. “It’s a matter of dignity,” she told me. “We will not mark ourselves as agents or spies voluntarily, because we’re patriots of this country.” As I left her office, I noticed a large white sticker of Putin’s face on the floor, covered by two red boot prints.
The English-language news organization OC Media, which covers current affairs in Georgia and elsewhere in the Caucasus region, also planned to defy the law. The goal now, the platform’s co-founder and executive director Mariam Nikuradze said, is to make it to October’s election “in some legal form,” in order to secure accreditation to observe the elections at the polls. “But I’m scared,” she told me. “I don’t know what the end of this year will look like.”
One big concern about October’s election is that a marginal win by an opposition party might see Georgian Dream challenge the vote. “We need an overwhelming majority,” Bokeria told me. There are high hopes that the considerable youth turnout at the protests will translate into votes come October, but it is still not clear whether the opposition can harness the upswell of dissatisfaction with Georgian Dream and turn it into electoral results. If Donald Trump wins the U.S. Presidential election in November, that could also affect Georgia’s trajectory. “To have Trump as U.S. President is not a blessing for civil society or Georgia’s opposition,” the analyst Kakachia told me. “He’s a transactional guy, and they’re really afraid that Trump’s nature might mean he’ll make a deal and throw Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova under the bus at some point.”
A few weeks after Gviniashvili’s arrest, he appeared before a judge. “The trial was a sham. The witnesses called by the prosecution were the arresting officers,” he said. Gviniashvili was charged with petty hooliganism and disobeying orders and was ordered to pay a fine of roughly nine hundred dollars. He is more determined than ever to vote Georgian Dream out. “There is no one good to vote for, but young people are going to vote for the opposition now,” Gviniashvili said. “We have no other choice.” ♦