Why Am I in Georgia?

I am in Georgia — the country, not the state. Most Americans don’t know there is a country called Georgia. When I had to call customer service to figure out why my phone wasn’t making calls in Georgia despite the international plan I bought before I left, neither the robots nor the live Americans I finally got in customer service knew that there is a country as well as a state called Georgia. One of the customer service people told me that I was confused. He was only convinced that it was him that was confused after I got him to google Tbilisi, Georgia.

I am in Georgia in solidarity with Georgian Greens and socialists, and indeed the 80% of Georgians, who prefer the democratic freedoms in Europe to their west over to the repressive Russian autocracy to their north. I will be interviewing these pro-democracy activists in order to share their perspectives with Greens and socialists back in the U.S.

Georgians vote on Saturday, October 26 in parliamentary elections where the basic choice is between the pro-Russia Georgia Dream and the pro-Western opposition.

Georgia is like the U.S., and nearby Moldova, in that they have elections where the stark choice is between liberal democracy and autocracy led by criminal billionaires.

Georgia is also like Ukraine and Moldova in that Russia militarily occupies significant portions of their internationally recognized territories. Russia occupies 20% of Ukraine and Georgia and 12% of Moldova.

The criminal billionaire leading the pro-Putin forces in Georgia is Bidzina Ivanishvili. This oligarch made his $7 billion fortune in computers, metals, and banking in the violent conflicts to get control of economic assets during the rapid privatization of the Russian economy in the 1990s. Ivanishvili is the oligarch behind the rise of the ruling Georgia Dream party, which displaced the increasingly authoritarian and repressive United National Movement under Mikheil Saakashvili in 2012.

Ivanishvili and Georgia Dream were nominally pro-European, socially liberal, and democratic when they first came to power. The Georgia Green Party had one member of parliament elected as part of the Georgia Dream slate in the country’s proportional representation system between 2012 and 2020. But the Georgia Greens withdrew in 2020 from the Georgia Dream slate as that party turned toward the kind of authoritarian, repressive, and socially conservative program that characterizes Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party to the north.

The last year has seen massive protests in the capital Tbilisi against a foreign agents registration law modeled after its Russian counterpart that Putin’s minions have used to repress all political and anti-war opposition. Last year, the protests got the parliament to back off. But this spring the parliament finally passed the law in May in the face of massive protests and a presidential veto the parliament had to overrule. Many Georgians are worried that the harsh police response to protests is just a foreshadowing of more state violence to keep the Georgian Dream in power.

Oligarch Ivanishvili promised for a second time at a campaign rally a few days ago to ban all pro-European political parties if Georgian Dream party wins. He also says the pro-European parties are trying to start a war with Russia, seemingly laying down the premise for holding on to power by force if Georgian Dream loses the election.

President Zourabichvili, an independent who was elected with Georgia Dream endorsement in 2018, has urged a vote for anyone but Georgia Dream in hopes that all the opposition parties can pull together a post-election governing coalition without Georgia Dream. The problem is that the biggest opposition party is the United National Movement who the voters threw out in 2012 for the same anti-authoritarian reasons that many now want to throw out the Georgia Dream. Progressives in Georgia are frustrated like Greens in the U.S. that the major party coalitions offer such miserable options.

Oligarch Ivanishvili has tried to mobilize the vote around culture war issues — promoting traditional family values including anti-LGBT laws — as well as the whipping up fear of Russian military intervention if Georgians elect a pro-European coalition to power.

President Zourabichvili has tried to make the central election issue a choice between pro-EU democracy against pro-Russian autocracy. She has urged the opposition parties, which are a range of socially liberal to conservative parties, to campaign on the democracy question and save the cultural issues to post-election debate in a democracy.

The Georgia Green Party decided after negotiating with opposition parties for placement on a coalition slate to abstain from this election. They said they could not get any media coverage running independently as the Green Party because all the commercial media only cover the paying oligarch-backed parties. The Greens have turned to preparing for local elections next year

Credible pre-election polls show a close race. Many fear election rigging by the ruling Georgia Dream party. Others fear Russian military intervention if the Georgia Dream loses. Some are going to hold their nose to vote for Georgia Dream in hopes of avoiding more Russian military intervention.

The crooked oligarch trying to buy elections in Moldava is Ilan Shor. Shore outright stole his billion. He defrauded three Moldovan banks out of about $1 billion in 2014, which was about 12% of Moldova’s GDP. Shor was convicted in absentia. Now Shor is pouring millions into Moldova’s elections this fall from his current home in Russia to encourage votes against the country’s pro-EU President Maia Sandu and a referendum to put the goal of EU membership in the country’s constitution. In the first round of elections on October 20, the pro-EU referendum passed with a razor thin 50.5% and Sandu came in first in the first round of the presidential election with 42% of the vote. Her pro-Russian opponent in the November 3 runoff election is Alexandr Stoianoglo who received 26%. Oligarch Shor is backing Stoianoglo.

Some of Shor’s money is apparently being promised to buy votes. BBC reported on a voter who expected to be paid for her vote but wasn’t.

When we asked directly whether she had been offered cash to vote, she admitted it without qualms. She was angry that a man who had sent her to the polling station was no longer answering her calls. “He tricked me!” she said.

The criminal oligarch in the US elections is, of course, Donald Trump, whose all-time favorite lawyer was Roy Cohn, who was also the attorney for the witch-hunting Senator Joe McCarthy and several of New York’s mafia dons.

All three of these elections reflect a disturbing trend of growing collaboration between billionaire oligarchs, organized crime, and autocratic states. We will know whether they are gaining power in the next month when we see the results of elections over next month in Georgia, Moldova, and the United States.

Georgia had the world’s first elected socialist government in 1918

Georgia, the country, is at intersection of Eastern Europe and West Asia in the mountainous southern Caucasus region. It lies across the Black Sea from Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and Bulgaria to Georgia’s west. Georgia is bordered by the Black Sea to its west, by Russia to the north, by Turkey to the southeast, by Armenia to the south, and by Azerbaijan to the southeast. An independent kingdom in the Middle Ages, Georgia has successively colonized by the Mongol, Ottoman, Persian, and finally Russian empires.

Georgia declared independence in 1918 after the 1917 Russian revolution. It elected the world’s first socialist government with an 81.5% majority for parliament. The Georgian branch of Russia’s Social Democratic Labor Party was affiliated with the Menshevik faction as opposed to the Bolshevik faction. Ruling until 1921, the Georgian Social Democratic Party gave peasants their own land for the first time, enfranchised women, abolished the death penalty, began universal public education, and began to gradually and progressively socialize Georgia’s small industrial sector by purchasing assets instead of expropriating them without compensation. This socialist experiment ended when the Russian Red Army, particularly at the urging of Georgia native Joseph Stalin, recolonized Georgia in 1921 and smashed Georgian Social Democratic Party. The 1918 socialist government of Georgia remains an inspiration to contemporary leftist youth in Georgia.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Georgia declared its independence again in 1991. Russia intervened militarily in inter-ethnic conflicts in 1992-93, leading to the Russian military occupation and administration of the Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions of Georgia. Another round of Russian military intervention broke out in 2008 after George W. Bush accounted that the U.S. wanted Georgia to join NATO. Russia recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, although the international community does not. Nearly 200,000 ethnic Georgians with expelled from South Ossetia.

Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1985 to 1991, was named as the head of Georgia’s new government in March 1992 and ruled until 2003 when he was deposed by the Rose Revolution, a popular uprising against election fraud that re-elected Shevardnadze. The Rose Revolution was one of the so-called color revolutions in the post-Soviet space for liberal democracy that counter-revolutionary Russia claims were orchestrated by Western covert action, as if the masses of people in these countries did not have their own reasons to revolt. Besides Georgia’s Rose Revolution (2003), the co-called color revolutions include Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004), Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution (2005) and Armenia’s Velvet Revolution (2018).

One of the leaders of the Rose Revolution, Zurab Zhvania, had been an early leader of Georgia’s Green Party during the fight for independence in the late 1980s and then in the first three years of the new parliament representing the Green Party. Zhvania would switch to Shevardnadze’s party in 1995 and become chair of the Parliament until 2001, when he broke with Shevardnadze over corruption. Zhvania formed a new party with Mikheil Saakashvili. Zhania would become prime ministry and Saakashvili would became Georgia’s prime minister from 2003 to 2005. But Zhvania died in 2005 under suspicious circumstances that his family and many observers believe was an assassination.

I will report next on my meeting with the leadership of the Greens Party of Georgia, the oldest party in Georgia and one of the counters of the European Federation of Green Parties. It had 11 members of the parliament in the 1990s in the early years of independence before oligarch’s bought the political system. Left and progressive politics is now largely absent from electoral politics. The left that exists is influential in street politics and cultural, literary, and academic spheres. But it yet to build, or rebuild, a competitive mass party on the left. That, too, is familiar to American leftists.

As a small country of 3.7 million people, Georgia has to navigate its way among the big powers around it, particularly the Russian giant to the north but also the economic hegemony to the west. It has to make its way in a world order that only gives lip service to the national and democratic rights of small nations and largely submits the demands of the big imperialist powers.

The parliamentary elections I am here to observe on Saturday, October 26 seem to be about whether Georgians are going to submit to that neo-colonial world order under the pro-Russian leadership of pro-Russia Georgia Dream or try to resist it by electing a pro-European but flawed coalition of parties.

From left: Howie Hawkins with Georgia Greens Party leaders Guram Nikoleishvili, Executive Committee Member; Merab Sharabidze, International Secretary; and Gia Gachechiladze, General Secretary.

As Kermit the Frog famously said, “It’s not easy being Green.” That is true in Georgia as well as America. Georgian Greens are as familiar with Kermit’s lament as we are.

Just to reinforce what I said in my last dispatch about how most Americans don’t know there is a country called Georgia, besides customer service rep for my international phone plan, I also had the same problem with customer service from my bank, which will not do overseas transactions on my debit card unless I tell them beforehand. When I told the bank customer service rep I needed to pre-authorize payments in Georgia, she tried to explain that wasn’t necessary because Georgia was in the United States. When I told her there was also a country called Georgia, she did find it on her list of countries and exclaimed she never knew.

When I told that story to Merab Sharabidze, a former Green Party member of the Georgian parliament, he shared that when he went to a U.S. government sponsored meeting on environmental issues in Washington, D.C. in the 1990s, it had taken him a while to convince the American official registering him for the conference that he was from the nation, not the state, of Georgia. He had to point to a picture on the wall of President Bill Clinton with Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze to convince the official.

Just because Americans don’t know about the country of Georgia doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. The results of the election in Georgia tomorrow will have ramifications throughout the East Europe and West Asia region. Will Georgia turn toward Europe and liberal democracy, or toward a Russia-dominated autocracy?

The ruling conservative Georgia Dream party is hoping to get elected on a socially conservative program of Orthodox Christian family values including discrimination against LGBTQ people and of avoiding Russian military intervention if Georgia votes the “wrong” way.

The opposition, led by the independent President, Salome Zourabichvili, is a contentious coalition of many parties that really only agree on one thing: liberal democracy and EU membership for Georgia.

Last night, I had dinner with three leaders of the Greens Party of Georgia: General Secretary Gia Gachechiladze, International Secretary Merab Sharabidze, and Guram Nikoleishvili, a member of the party’s executive committee. Guram was my guest on the Green Socialist Notes podcast on June 29 to talk about the massive street protests in Tbilisi against the foreign agents registration law, which civil society organizations and activists fear will enable the state to crush their activities as Russia has used a similar law to silence all political and anti-war opposition to Putin.

The Greens Party of Georgia does not have candidates in tomorrow’s election. The party’s General Secretary, Gia Gachechiladze, was involved in negotiations with the other parties in which President Zourabichvili was playing match maker for the opposition coalition. But the Greens failed to get any of their candidates listed on a common slate under the Georgia’s fully proportional system where 150 members of parliament are elected by closed party or coalitions lists from a single national constituency, with a 5% electoral threshold to be awarded seats.

All the slates sere finalized only about ta month ago for an election campaign that is obviously much shorter than American election campaigns. The Greens decided not to run anyone because as one of the few parties not sponsored by a wealthy oligarch, they wouldn’t get any media coverage because the major media organizations are owned by the oligarchs that sponsor the other parties. They said the social media platforms are also tough for them, too, because they are also owned by oligarchs, just like Elon Musk owns X, formerly Twitter.

The Greens Party did qualify in 2024 as a registered party that could have run candidates because they submitted a petition that required 30,000 signatures. The party itself has about 3,000 formal members, but only about 100 who are consistent activists. Completing the 30,000-signature petition shows the Greens still have energy and public support. But they have little money. Instead of oligarch funding, the Greens rely on membership dues. But given the economic hard times Georgia faces, the party has suspended collecting dues until economic conditions improve. They will observe the election tomorrow and then turn their focus to local elections next year.

The Greens Party of Georgia is the oldest party in Georgia. It is a founding member of the European Green Party, the federation of Green parties in the European Parliament. It got its start in the last years of the Soviet Union when it campaigned from 1989 to 1992 for multi-party democratic elections and independence for Georgia. In the first parliamentary elections in 1992, the Greens elected 11 members to the parliament.

A Green member of parliament, Zurab Zhvania, switched to Shevardnadze’s ruling party in the 1995 election and became the chair of the parliament until 2001, when he broke with Shevardnadze over corruption. Zhvania formed a new party with Mikheil Saakashvili and would become prime minister with Saakashvili as President from 2003 to 2005. But Zhvania died in 2005 under suspicious circumstances that his family and many observers believe was an assassination.

After Zhavania’s death, the Greens had no one in the government to protect them from the increasingly corrupt and repressive United National Movement of Saakashvili, whose goons raided and smashed up the Greens Party offices in 2007.

In 2010, the Greens were part of the Georgia Dream coalition, which at that time was the pro-democracy force that rose up to drive Saakashvili and his UNM from power. The Greens Party’s International Secretary, Merab Sharabidze, was the Green on the Georgia Dream’s election slate and served in parliament until 2020. His business card from his days in the parliament identifies his parliamentary faction as “Georgia Dream – Greens.” The Greens left Georgia Dream because it became more authoritarian and pro-Russian. The current General Secretary, Gia Gachechiladze, has held his position as leader of the party since 2008.

Merab and Gia appear to be in their sixties. Guram looks to be 30 something. I enjoyed eating and drinking with them. We ate Georgian fare, including a Georgian pizza, meat filled dumplings, spinach balls of spinach and spices, and cheese and fruit.

They drank vodka and beer. I don’t drink alcohol, but I went through three cups of coffee, which I definitely needed after traveling east through two nights in 24 hours from New York to Georgia (the nation) and thoroughly confusing my jet-lagged biorhythms. We toasted repeatedly to the Green Party and to peace, with the threat of another Russian military intervention in Georgia, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and Israel’s war on Palestine on our minds.

They explained to me their view that Russia’s first military intervention in 1992-1993 in which Russia occupied the provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia was in retaliation for Georgia permitting a pipeline for Azerbaijan gas to go through Georgia to Armenia, then Turkey, and on to Europe. The Russians had wanted Azerbaijan to send its gas through Georgia and then north through Russia and Ukraine to Europe in order to make Europe fully dependent on Russian gas exports.

The 2008 Russian war in Georgia, the Georgian Greens said, was precipitated by George W. Bush’s declaration that Georgia and Ukraine should become part of NATO. Russia then recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent, although the international community does not.

The three Greens I met with were divided on whether the governing or opposition coalition would win and what the consequences would be. The younger Guram was the optimist, thinking the opposition would win and open up political space for the Greens that the repressive Georgia Dream government is closing down. Gia and Merab thought Georgia Dream would win, but were not so worried that it would lead to the suppression of Green politics. Gia said the Greens survived the Saakashvili’s violent attack on the Green Party offices in 2007, so they can handle another Georgia Dream government led this time by its oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili. Merab felt Ivanishvili’s threat to shut down the pro-European opposition parties was just campaign rhetoric. Merab said that as the oldest Georgian party with an honorable history in winning democracy and independence for Georgia in the early 1990s and with Greens’ veterans from that period still active, he didn’t think Ivanishvili would dare go after the Greens. We will soon know whose predictions are more accurate.

With more than 99% of precincts counted, official results from the Central Election Commission (CEC) have the ruling Georgian Dream with a 54.2% majority. The combined total of opposition parties that passed the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation is 37.4%.

Exit polling told a different story. Two Western polling companies that we in America are familiar with had similar results. Edison Research had Georgia Dream (GD) receiving 40.9%. HarrisX had GD at 42%, both indicating strong wins for the pro-European opposition. But the exit poll commissioned by pro-GD Imedi TV and conducted by Gorbi had GD with a comfortable 56.1% majority.

One official election observer I spoke to said, “It was a fix.” I will meet with this person in the next day or two and will quote him in future dispatches if this person can be quoted at this time given their official election observer role.

Not surprisingly, Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orban congratulated GD and its multi-billionaire oligarch leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, on the basis of the Gorbi exit poll before any vote totals had been reported.

But many do not accept the legitimacy of the reported election results.

Georgia’s independent President, Salome Zurabishvili, said the results reported by the CEC were falsified by GD. The CEC is widely regarded as controlled by GD appointees. At a news conference surrounded by leaders of opposition political parties, Zurabishvili said the election was a “total fraud” and a “total robbery” of votes. She said the elections were “Russian” in nature.

The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), which closely monitored election, concluded that the results may not reflect the will of the Georgian people, citing reports of voter intimidation, vote buying, confiscation of ID cards, and collection and processing of personal data.

The anti-corruption organization Transparency International rejected the official results.

The International Election Observation Mission issued its Preliminary Findings and Conclusions on the October 26 Parliamentary elections, saying that elections “unfolded amid entrenched polarization in an environment marred by concerns over recently adopted legislation, its impact on fundamental freedoms and civil society.” While “contestants could generally campaign freely “reports of pressure on voters, particularly on public sector employees, remained widespread in the campaign.

International Election Observation Mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Eurpe (OSCE) reported pressure on voters, particularly on public sector employees, including extensive tracking of voters on election day fight “raised concerns about the ability of some voters to cast their vote without fear of retribution.”

The European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations (ENEMO) gave a briefing in which it reported “Critical violations included violence against opposition members, voter intimidation, smear campaigns targeting observers, and extensive misuse of administrative resources. Restrictive enforcement of campaign regulations limited competition, exerted significant pressure on civil society and the media, and reduced space for government criticism….The cumulative impact of these observed issues significantly compromised the democratic integrity of the election process.”

The head of the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, Nona Kurdovanidze, held a briefing to say the elections were held “against a background of significant violations, predominantly in an unfair, violent and tense environment”. Among the many violations she listed were multiple voting by individuals, obstructing election monitors, violations of ballot secrecy, intimidating GD cameras monitoring verification machine and voting booths, identification of voters outside of polling stations party representatives, and obstructing journalists.

One number no one is disputing is the turnout, which was reported to be 58.9%.

The pro-European parties have said they will not accept the seats they won in parliament. They are meeting as I write to decide their next course of action.

Political Crisis

A political crisis is likely to ensue from this disputed election. In the last parliamentary election in 2020, the opposition said the Georgia Dream party had fixed the election and it took five months of negotiations mediated by the EU before a government could be formed.

This time, however, the stakes are higher. The opposition called it a Europe vs. Russia election and they want to ally with Europe. The ruling Georgia Dream party accused the pro-European opposition of being Western proxies trying to subvert the traditional conservative Orthodox Christian values of Georgian society and drag Georgia into Russo-Ukranian war on Ukraine’s side.

In its election campaign, Georgia Dream promised if elected to ban the pro-European parties, cut off foreign funding for civil society organizations like labor unions and environmental campaigns, and expand discrimination against LGBTQ people. But even if the 54% it won holds, it is well short of the two-thirds majority it would need to pass such legislation over the veto of the president, who for now is an independent allied with the opposition.

But the opposition is still very concerned, especially for the powers the Georgian state was given to repress civic, academic, and political dissent with the passage of the foreign agents registration law in May. They called it the Russia law because it is modeled after similar legislation that Putin has used to criminalize and suppress anti-war and political dissent in Russia.

Foreign Intervention

For a comprehensive discussion of the authoritarian consequences of the foreign agents law among five Georgian leftists, see this interview published jointly by Posle, a publication of exiled Russian socialists, and by Tempest, an American socialist publication: “Resisting authoritarianism in the Caucasus: Interview with Georgians about their struggle to defend democracy,” June 7, 2024.

A central point of their analysis is that Georgia Dream is turning to authoritarian repression because popular environmental campaigns have been disrupting a major hydoelectic dam and a manganese mine. Projects like these are key to Georgia’s role as an exploited neocolonial source and transit hub for raw materials for capitalist investors from the U.S., EU, China, Turkey, and Russia alike. The ancient villages and farms of ordinary Georgians are slated to become sacrifice zones imposed by the Georgian state on behalf of global capitalism. I will be meeting with one of these Georgian leftists, Ia Eradze, tomorrow and with another one, Lela Rekhviashvili, in Germany next month.

The role that Georgia plays in the world economy explains why Russia and the West have been trying to influence the Georgian election. The Russian influence is obvious in the anti-liberal, anti-LGBTQ, pro Orthodox Christian messaging. Many believe Russian money is paying for votes and election meddling. The West withdrew Georgia’s EU candidate status when the foreign agents law passed. Georgia Dream claims the West is trying to overthrow its rule in a “color revolution,” the Russian counter-revolutionary term for dismissing any popular uprising as the work of Western outside agitators. It is like the Southern Dixiecrats in the 1950s and 1960s who claimed that the Black civil rights movement to end voting disenfranchisement, segregation, and discrimination was only the work of outside “Communist” agitators.

The reality of popular movements in Georgia is different. The foreign agents law is aimed at far more than NGOs funded by Western sources. It is also aimed at academic freedom and popular movements. Lela Rekhviashvili, who has written one book on the popular campaign against a mega-dam in Western Georgia and is working on another, emphasizes that this anti-dam movement is largely funded by remittances from Georgian migrant laborers in Western Europe. One reason many Georgians want their country to become an EU member is so migrant laborers can readily work in Western Europe and send remittances back to impoverished families back home. See Lela Rekhviashvili, Luka Nakhutsrishvili, Konstantine Eristavi, Alexandra Aroshvili, and Ia Eradze, “There’s more at stake in the fight against the Foreign Agents Law than liberal NGOs: Why the left should show solidarity with the protests in Georgia,” LeftEast, May 28, 2024.

Party and Movement in the Georgian Greens

Today I meet with Nato Kirvalidze, who I had spoken with online in June in a Zoom meeting of the Ukraine Solidarity Network and then a Greens Socialist Notes podcast. It was nice to meet in person. She took me on a walk with her dog in a park by a lake on the edge of Tblisi followed by a Georgian brunch of tomato and cucumber salad with a pizza-shaped cheese-filled pastry called Khachapuri.

Nato is an environmental scientist and one of the original Greens in Georgia from the late 1980 and early 1990s. She is thankfully assisting and guiding me on my visit in Georgia. She was the Greens Party of Georgia representative to the European Green Party. She explained how the original Greens Party had three sections within one organization: the Greens Movement that focused on education and action in civil society, the research arm that did scientific and policy studies, and the Greens Party that focused on electoral and legislative politics. But legislation in the mid 1990s required the legal separation of these organizations. Although the three branches of the Green movement tried to continue coordinating informally, they drifted apart.

The Greens Party was weakened because it was not able to draw directly on the Greens Movement activists. What had been a party of 6,000 dues-paying members with 11 members of parliament in the early 1990s is today a party of 3,000 nominal members who do not support the party with dues and have no parliamentary representation. The party was also undoubtedly hurt when its early leader, Zurab Zhvania, left the party in the 1995 parliamentary election to form another party with Eduard Shevardnadze, as I recounted in my previous dispatches. Many Greens followed Zhvania out of the party, including Nino Chkhobadze, a co-founder of the Greens Movement, who due to Zhvania’s influence, became Georgia’s environmental minister from 1995 until 2004 when she resigned in opposition to an environmentally and geopolitically controversial oil pipeline.

Nato has set up a meeting for me with Nino tomorrow. Nino remains active in the Greens Movement, whose website indicates the movement remains an active popular organization. It is affiliated with Friends of the Earth International. The Greens Party of Georgia is affiliated with the European Green Party (EGP), but the website link listed on their affiliation page with the EGP is a dead link.

Later in the week, we will be meeting with activists in the new, younger Green Party that has a more egalitarian feminist, pro-LGBTQ, and economic and environmental justice orientation than the old Green Party. We will travel to the sites of the anti-mining and anti-mega dam battles. And we will monitor and perhaps witness any mass marches and demonstrations concerning the election results.

Marching Towards the Parliament Building

Orban had rushed to Georgia to congratulate billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili and his Georgia Dream party’s apparent return to power. While the EU Council was calling for an investigation of reported widespread voter intimidation, vote buying, ballot box stuffing, and the like, Orban was trying to use Hungary’s temporary possession of the rotating Presidency of the EU Council to give a phony EU stamp of approval on the election. The EU Council issued a statement that Orban had no mandate to do so from the Council.

People on the street were not so diplomatic, as this clip shows. Above the whistling and booing, you can hear one protester shouting a couple of times “Putin Huylo,” which he changes to “Orban Hulylo” for many more denunciations. Putin or Orban huylo is an extremely derogatory slogan that originated in Ukraine. It means “Putin/Orban is a dickhead” or a fool. It literally translates into “Putin/Orban sits on dick.” That this Georgian protester uses that protest slogan and chant from Ukraine against Putin ally Orban is another indication of how Georgians see Ukrainians as allies in their struggles against Russian recolonization. 

The rally opened with the Georgian National Anthem during which I panned the crowd that could be seen from my spot. Standing room only for blocks.

Ia Eradze’s research focus as a political economist is on finance in the post-socialist space. She is currently an associate professor at the Georgian Institute for Public Affairs (GIPA) and a CERGE-EI Foundation teaching fellow. She is also a researcher at the Institute for Social and Cultural Research, Ilia State University.

Here are two articles that Ia Eradze co-authored that deal with the issues addressed in this interview:

“There’s more at stake in the fight against the Foreign Agents Law than liberal NGOs: Why the left should show solidarity with the protests in Georgia,” LeftEast, May 28, 2024, https://lefteast.org/theres-more-at-stake-in-the-fight-against-the-foreign-agents-law-than-liberal-ngos-why-the-left-should-show-solidarity-with-the-protests-in-georgia/.

Ia Eradze, Giorgi Kartvelishvili, Luka Nakhutsrishvili, Tamar Qeburia, and Lela Rekhviashvili, “Resisting authoritarianism in the Caucasus: Interview with Georgians about their struggle to defend democracy,” Tempest and Posle Media, June 5, 2024, https://tempestmag.org/2024/06/resisting-authoritarianism-in-the-caucasus/.

Ia Eradze’s website has more of her work: https://iaeradze.org/.

I discussed what has happened to the Greens Party since the height of its influence in the 1990s in my October 27 dispatch (No. 2). More details can be found at Tamar Pataraia, Georgia: History of Green Politics (Heinrich Boell Foundation, 2013). A major event was the movement of the Green Party leader Zurab Zhvania into the party of Eduard Sheverdnadze, which resulted in Zhvania and some other Greens taking leading positions in the Georgia government. One of them was Nino Chkobadze who became Georgia’s assistant environmental minister in 1993 and the environmental minister from 1995 to 2004. Under Nino’s tenure, most of Georgia’s environmental laws were adopted.

In this dispatch, I will discuss what I learned from my meeting with Nino Chkhobadze, the Chair of the Greens Movement since her she left Georgia’s environmental ministry twenty years ago, along with Greens Movement veterans Akaki Panchulidze and Nato Kirvalidze.

The most vibrant and powerful social movements in Georgia are community-based environmental movements against projects that are damaging communities and their local environments. They two most powerful movements are against an abusive manganese mining company and a mega-dam project.

Shukruti Manganese Mine

When I met with the Greens Movement leaders in their offices on October 29, they told me about the biggest current environmental struggle in Georgia. It is in the village of Shukruti, where the community is losing their homes as they falling into the collapsing manganese mine underneath it. The community is also being poisoned by an open pit mine. We talked to a geologist in the campaign over the phone who explained that the open pit mine is causing sulfur dioxide to be released as it cuts through one of the geological strata to get to the manganese. Sulfur dioxide irritates and can damage the nose, throat, lungs, and eyes, causing or worsening asthma, bronchitis, and heart disease, and shortening life expectancy with chronic exposure. Mine tailings are also polluting the river through the region.

The village of Shukruti has been protesting for most of the last year, conducting an encampment outside the mines. They are asking for compensation for the homes that have been lost and for the mining to be done in a way that protects the community and its environment. They don’t want to shut the mine down. It has been their main source of jobs for many years. But a new corporation bought and took over management of the mine about eight years ago. Under their management, the underground explosives have increased without regard for its impact on the village above. The open pit mine is new. The people want to continue mining, but in a way that protects Shukruti instead of destroying it.

The protest movement now has a contingent sitting on the steps of the Parliament Building every day. It has widespread popular support. Georgia role in global capitalism is to serve as a source and transit hub for raw materials linking China and the EU, as Georgia has since the days of the the Great Silk Road between China and Europe in the 6th through 15th centuries. What the Shukruti movement is ultimately demanding is that Georgia’s role in the world economy serve its people before outside investors.

The biggest outside investor now is the Ukrainian oligarch, Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who is under indictment in the U.S. for bank fraud and under arrest in Ukraine for fraud and for the murder of a lawyer in a corporate dispute. The state has been trying to suppress the movement with court injunctions against the protests with the support of both the Georgia Dream party and the main opposition party the United National Movement. Both are more beholden to corporate interests than the people they represent. Under the pressure of the movement, the state appointed a regulator, but he lives in the capital city of Tbilisi, not in the Rioni Valley region of the mines and is believed to be taking bribes for looking the other way at environmental law violations and taking kickbacks on a poorly executed water treatment project that has not cleaned up the water. The popularity and force of environmental movements like the Shukruti movement are the strongest challenges to the rule of Georgia Dream and its billionaire leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili. The environmental movements implicitly pose the issues of real democratic accountability and regulation of the economy that threaten the rule of oligarchs like Kolomoyskyi and Ivanishvili.

For more on the Shukruti protests, see Mari Imerlishvili, “Manganese Mining: Shukruti Locals’ Protests Fall on Deaf Ears,” Civil Georgia, September 13, 2024.

Namakhvani Hydroelectric Power Plant

The most significant grassroots environmental campaign has been the movement to stop the Namakhvani dam and hydroelectric power plant in the Rioni Valley. We talked about this project at the meeting at the Greens Movement offices in Tblisi. Out of that meeting they set up a meeting with leaders of the movement to stop the dam. So the next day I met by Zoom with Varlam Goletiani and Nino Gogua of the movement from their local region that is a four-hour drive to the west of Tbilisi, along with Nino Chkhobadze and Nato Kirvalidze. Varlam is the spokesperson for the movement and Nino Gogua was the his able translator.

They explained how the movement got started in 2020 to stop the flooding of 18 villages and their surrounding ancient vineyards as wells as stopping enormous ecological damage to the whole region from the proposed mega-dam. The state was moving ahead with no environmental or social impact studies. The movement persisted with frequent protests demonstrations, camp-ins, and public education until they won what they call a pause, not a cancellation of the project. The original investors pulled out due the protests. The movement believes, however, that behind the scenes, the government is recruiting a new set of investors for what the government says will be an important step toward Georgia’s energy self-reliance.

One of the tactics of the state and corporate developers was to try to discredit this local grassroots movement by saying it was whipped up by outside agitators, initially blaming Russians and later Westerners. When the foreign agents registration law was being debated in the last two years, the ruling Georgia Dream party leaders said the movement was funded by western NGOs who were agents of the globalizing war party trying to get Georgia into a third war with Russia since independence. But the movement kept scrupulous records of its finances, which showed that most of the movement’s funding came from regular $10-$20 remittances sent to them by migrant laborers working in Western Europe. The Georgia Dream then said that they needed the foreign agents law so they could snoop around and find the outside funding of the movement. The smear tactics back fired and the movement won broad support across Georgian society.

The movement they organized also stopped the development of a 100,000 square meter forest into a private resort that would have enclosed the forest from traditional uses by the surrounding villages. The movement also successfully pushed for paving the the main road through the region that had become so impassable with ruts that bus transportation stopped and most truck traffic did as well. The road is needed so the region’s products can be brought to market and outside goods can be imported to the region. Grape cultivation and wine production date back 8,000 years in the Rioni Valley of Georgia, where it was probably first invented. The region has developed many unique varieties of grapes and wine adapted to micro-environments in the mountainous region.

With young people leaving the region for the big city Tbilisi or jobs in the migrant labor markets of Western Europe, this grape and wine industry is seen by the indigenous people as the foundation for their future economic development. They don’t have a detailed development plan, saying they are not experts. But they are demanding the state pay for experts to do studies and then consult with the local people on what their development possibilities are and what their approach should be.

The grassroots movement did get some mediation regrind the mega-dam project from the Energy Community of the EU, which is a consultative process of EU countries and their neighboring countries to the east about building an integrated energy market and infrastructure across Europe. But the movement never heard back from the EU Energy Community.

Over the course of our conversation, we compared notes about their success in pausing the mega-dam and my experience in the anti-nuclear movement in pausing nuclear power development in the U.S for almost 40 years. I told them about who the Clamshell Alliance in New England occupied the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction site in 1977, arrested 1,414 of us, and put our anti-nuclear movement in the national headlines for the 10 days most of us were locked up on National Guard armories. That action spawned anti-nuclear alliances across the country and the industry did not order a new nuclear power plant for 35 years until 2012 when the Obama administration put federal guarantees on loans to build new nuclear power plants. Four plants were attempted and only two completed at enormous cost overruns and construction delays. The Rioni Valley activists had never heard of our success in pausing nuclear power development in the U.S.

So we noted our common ground in having paused destructive developments in our respective countries and how we never say cancelled or stopped because the exploitative big businesses are working full time to get their projects back on track. Another common theme we found is that the power structure tries to discredit us by saying we are sincere and even endearing, but emotional and not very smart or rational. But we have found, in their movement and in our anti-nuclear movement, that developers experts are not very smart or well-informed and that we expose their ignorance and shallow thinking in public meetings with sharp, smart questions and statements. We talked about how they could deal with the U.S. Embassy, which was promoting the investors’ interests, not the public or environmental interests. That is where international pressure could help from within the U.S. could help.

The Rioni Valley activists lamented that the Western environmental movement had not been very supportive of their struggle, which they suspected was due to the fact that Georgia is a small country traditionally colonized by Russia and in what it considers its sphere of influence. Activists in Georgia expect better solidarity from the international environmental movement because that is the only way they can protect their communities and environment in a small country that the big powers, both Western and Russian, regard as pawns in their geopolitical and geoeconomics competition. We agreed to stay in touch, keep each other informed on our activities, and offer mutual support.

For more on the Rioni Valley movement, see Lela Rekhviashvili, “Struggle for the Rioni Valley in between Political and Civil Society terrains,” LeftEast, March 7, 2023. Lela is a Georgian leftist and political geographer who I will meet with and interview in Germany in late November.

Georgia in the Climate Movement

At the meeting at the Greens Movement office in Tbilisi the day before, we also discussed their perspectives on Georgia’s energy future. While the government is pushing small and medium and well as mega dams with hydro-electric power plants, of which there are plenty of potential sites in mountainous Georgia, the Greens Movement was a stop to new hydro. Instead they want to retrofit existing hydro plants with new generators that produce 50% more power, to institute an aggressive energy conservation and efficiency program across all sectors, and expand existing power capacity with wind and solar. They want to phase out fossil fuels. Although Georgia has little potential for fossil fuel development unlike neighboring Russia and Azerbaijan, they still oppose any fossil fuel development. There was an anti-fracking poster made by a school child posted in their office conference room.

There are two other groups in the Greens movement in Georgia I should mention. One is a new Green Party consisting of younger activists with a more feminist, pro-LGBTQ, and anti-oligarch, pro-economic equality perspective than the old Green Party. I was supposed to meet with them, but they got sick after the demonstration at the Parliament Building on Monday night. A lot of people I encountered got sick after the election. It seems to be how many of the shocked and depressed opposition activists have responded to the stress and shock of the election. In any case, we hope to do the meeting by Zoom in the next couple of weeks. Here is an article about the new Green Party, which is still small since the announcement in this article two years ago. Tata Shoshiashvili, “New pro-queer and feminist green party launches in Georgia,” OC Media, November 28, 2022. Their social media is active: https://mtsvaneebi.ge/, https://www.facebook.com/mtsvaneebi/, https://x.com/mtsvaneebi?lang=en.

Finally, there is Green Alternative, which seems to be the best staffed and funded environmental group in Georgia. It seems to have grown out of the Greens Movement in the early 2000s, but I don’t know what that split was about. I didn’t become aware of their roots in the Greens politics movement until I had been in Georgia for several days and it was too late to try and meeting with them. Their website: https://greenalt.org/en/.

My overall takeaway is that Green politics has been central to democratic and progressive politics in Georgia since the late Soviet period. It has not sustained a Green Party with electoral clout, although everyone in the broader Green movement wants to see that. And that centrality of ecological issues in Georgia politics remains, as the grassroots movements in the Rioni Valley and Shukruti that have generated such broad popular support across the country testify. That confluence of popular democracies movements around environmental issues only makes sense when the grow-or-die global capitalist economy is consuming the biosphere and destroying out means to life.

Alex Scrivener is the executive director at Democracy Security Institute. Based in Tbilisi, Georgia, Alex is responsible for the management and organizational strategy of the organization. A previous fellowship recipient of the Eurasia Democratic Security Network (EDSN), Alex is a long-time analyst of the region, with a special focus on the Caucasus. Alex has worked for a variety of international, civil society, and media organizations in Europe and the region, including the BBC, the International Criminal Court, Global Justice Now, and the Transnational Institute. His articles have been published in a variety of media including the Guardian, the Independent and Open Democracy.

A couple of recent articles by Alex on the situation in Georgia and Eastern Europe in the shadow of Russian imperialism.

Alex Scrivener, “It’s time for progressives to talk about tanks: In Russia’s former colonies, the hard security conversation is unavoidable, Foreign Policy in Focus, August 23, 2024.

Alex Scrivener, “The Other Georgia — How Russia Could Win,” Center for European Policy Analysis, May 30, 2024.