Georgia’s democracy is dead now. Reason? The people there have rejected the West, the EU and have voted to keep pro-Georgia, pro-Russia policies in place. Official verdict is out now! The ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party has won 54% of the vote, meaning the GD will rule the country for the next four years now. They have 91 seats in the 150-seat parliament.
This has rattled pro-EU opposition parties big time.
Tina Bokuchava of the opposition United National Movement said the elections had been falsified and the vote “stolen from the Georgian people”. Another opposition leader, Nika Gvaramia, said Georgian Dream had mounted a “constitutional coup”.
Opposition described the elections as a choice for people between the EU and Russia. Indeed, these were the most crucial polls since Georgians attained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Dream Party’s founder, on the other hand, had earlier warned that people had a simple choice: “Either a government that served them, or an opposition of “foreign agents, who will carry out only the orders of a foreign country”.
Now, it’s clear that people have thrown their weight behind Russia and have out-rightly rejected the EU.
This is something Georgia’s pro-EU president is unable to stomach. Salome Zurabishvili, declared Sunday she will not accept the results and in fact called on people to hit the streets, stage protests. Wow, indeed a great show of democracy!
Guess what, the pro-EU president said she was the only “independent institution left in this state.”
She has gone bonkers; she even directly called on foreign nations to protect Georgia. She said no country should establish ties with this new Georgian govt to “protect Georgia” and “geopolitical balance in this region”.
The ruling party reacted, “Georgia no longer has a president. Georgia has an agent, a leader of the radical opposition.”
In any functioning democracy, the will of the people reign supreme. The Georgians realised that the pro-western opposition was trying to pull their nation into a Ukraine-style conflict. In 2008, Georgia fought a war with Russia that lasted five days and left deep scars, and the invasion of Ukraine has left some in the country wary of the possible consequences of provoking Russia by moving closer to the west.
A few months ago Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service accused the US of preparing to stage a Ukraine-style revolution in the streets to stop GD from winning a fourth term in office. We know what happened in Ukraine in 2014, pro-Russia President Viktor Fedorovych was forcibly removed from the power and a pro-EU leader was installed. Russia believes a similar kind of campaign is underway in Georgia now. Russia even claimed that foreign agents are pressing Georgia’s former prime minister to join a war with Russia “for three or four days”.
The Georgians have refused to be on the wrong side of the history. On one side, you have the EU which is slowly and surely falling apart! Nations like Hungary and Slovakia have already embraced Russia. Germany is now looking to befriend Russia again. EU is outdated. On the other hand, Russia is a bright spot in Europe, its economy is booming. Its international stature remains intact. It’s friends with non-Western superpowers like China and India. Russia is also an energy superpower. For the Georgian voters, the choice was simple.
But now their biggest challenge would be, to stop a Western-backed coup. The US and the EU, and their agents, look all set to dethrone the democratically-elected government in Georgia. Let’s see how Georgians respond to it.
