A year on from Georgia’s highly contested 2024 parliamentary election, the Georgian Dream (GD) government has banned rival parties, imprisoned their leaders and branded them saboteurs, successfully laying the foundations for dictatorship in Georgia.

On October 26, Georgians held their largest anti-government protest in weeks to mark a year since the disputed vote, which saw GD win a fourth consecutive term in power amid widespread fraud allegations.

The EU, US and Georgian flags that filled Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue last month sent a clear message: demonstrators continue to demand a change of power and their country’s return to the Euro-Atlantic path.

GD suspended membership talks with the European Union shortly after winning the October 2024 vote, sparking outrage across a country largely in favour of joining the European bloc.

A year on, Georgia’s pro-Western opposition and much of civil society maintain that GD rigged the election and has no legitimate claim to power.  

The GD government’s mounting repression of its opponents since the 2024 election – most recently banning the country’s three largest opposition groups and launching criminal charges against their political opponents for allegedly inciting a coup – has led to a barrage of condemnation by Georgia’s traditional Western partners.

Georgia’s diplomatic and economic isolation from the UK, EU and US has followed, as well as widespread sanctions on top GD officials.

As external pressure on the government builds and protests continue nightly at home, the general consensus among GD’s political rivals is that the ruling party’s eventual collapse is inevitable.  

“The regime has already lost, its days are numbered,” declared former president and opposition rallying point Salome Zourabichvili at the election anniversary rally, which was organised by several anti-GD groups and titled “To the End, Until Victory”.

The reality, however, feels very different.

The speed and success with which GD has consolidated absolute power, coupled with the current lack of any convincing political alternative, is cementing a growing feeling of desperation and hopelessness in the South Caucasus country.

“The regime is not weakening; it is strengthening… I don’t agree with those who say [the opposition] will win soon,” stated political analyst Paata Zakareishvili the day after the October 26 protest.

Far from being unsteadied, Zakareishvili argues, GD has, in fact, been “bolstered” by two notable attempts by its opponents to weaken the party’s grip on power. These were the pro-Western opposition’s parliamentary boycott immediately following the vote last October, and protesters’ failed “peaceful revolution” attempt on October 4, the same day municipal elections were held in Georgia.

Unlike former president Zourabichvili, Zakareishvili does not view GD as a party about to self-implode.  

“Today, Georgian Dream is calm,” the analyst noted, alluding to how the ruling party appears unfazed by both domestic unrest and western criticism.

GD does want legitimacy, Zakareishvili continued, but “on their own terms, not according to international standards”, and, regardless, this comes very much secondary to their “primary concern” – to maintain power.

Single party rule

GD won last month’s municipal vote by a landslide. All bar two of the pro-Western opposition parties boycotted proceedings, meaning the ruling party ran uncontested in many regions across the country and took first place in all 64.

Despite a rallying call from the Strong Georgia opposition bloc’s mayoral candidate Irakli Kupradze to “take back” the capital, GD’s Kakha Kaladze secured a third term as Tbilisi mayor without much difficulty, despite the opposition traditionally holding strong support there.  

Since the vote, GD has enacted a pledge to ban its political opponents, on October 28 filing a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court to have the three biggest opposition parties banned, including the United National Movement (UNM) which governed Georgia from 2003-12 under imprisoned ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili.

While this was not the blanket ban it initially promised, picking and choosing which parties to outlaw has the advantage of belittling smaller groups, which GD have openly declared to be non-threatening, and many of the leaders of which remain in prison anyway.

Soon after, on November 6, prosecutors launched criminal cases against eight major opposition leaders, accusing them of “sabotage” and “crimes against the state”, including inciting a coup to topple the GD government. Six are already behind bars, while bail for the two free has been set at nearly $400,000 each. Some amongst the group face up to 15 years in prison.

Though it appeared he might have been off the hook, Georgian PM and leader of the For Georgia opposition party Giorgi Gakharia was charged in absentia a week later over allegations surrounding Georgia’s Gavrilov Night protests that took place when Gakharia was interior minister. He faces up to 13 years in prison.

Outlawing the opposition has inevitably provoked criticism, though little of weight from those with the power to come down hard on GD – namely the EU, which could choose to revoke visa-free travel privileges for Georgians.

In the Commission's recent enlargement report, Commissioner Marta Kos made what are now routine criticisms of GD, condemning the party’s “serious democratic backsliding” and declaring it an EU candidate country “in name only”. As usual, GD debunked and downplayed the allegations, claiming Brussels had “completely lost touch with European values”.

Meanwhile, NGOs inside Georgia have decried the ban as an attempt to “criminalise” the opposition and “suppress dissenting opinions”.

The Strong Georgia and UNM opposition blocs have appealed to the Georgian courts to have the legislation outlawing GD’s political opponents declared unconstitutional, denouncing the bill for “reinforcing dictatorship”. It seems unlikely this will come to anything, however, given the judiciary’s loyalty to the ruling party.

Such backlash from domestically and abroad – especially when it comes from figures they have publicly branded “unserious” and involved in “unserious” politics – does not ruffle GD in the slightest.

Indeed, such reactive rhetoric from critics achieves little but to expose how Georgia’s opposition lacks agency and remains at the whim of whatever the ruling party decides to do.

As their opponents scramble to retaliate to GD’s every move, the ruling party is left free to shift the political goalposts around as it chooses.

Weak – if any – opposition

Meanwhile, Georgia’s spectrum of pro-Western opposition parties – plagued by an inability to unite or effectively rally support – remain as powerless as they are divided.

Zakareishvili noted that toppling GD would be easy if the opposition were united: “GD’s strength lies in the opposition’s weakness,” he stated.

As the analyst sees it, the parliamentary boycott initiated by four pro-Western opposition blocs last October was a mistake, even irresponsible, and achieved little but to weaken the opposition themselves – who have lacked formal political representation for over a year now – and strengthen GD, which was free to pass a mountain of repressive laws unchallenged.

In mid-October, 11 members of Gakharia’s For Georgia (though not their exiled leader) broke ranks and took seats in the disputed parliament, noting that, unfortunately, the opposition’s boycott of the legislature as a form of protest had failed to curb GD’s consolidation of power.

GD, predictably, welcomed this decision smugly, pointing out the “foolishness” of the initial boycott and ultimately highlighting how the opposition are incapable of formulating a shared approach even in relation to their common political rival.

Nearly all the opposition leaders who called for the boycott post October 2024 remain behind bars, rapidly losing credibility, and will likely remain there for a long time in light of the new criminal cases opened against them.

On November 10, seven opposition parties issued a joint statement condemning what they described as GD’s “political persecution” of its opponents. They warned that, the more the state tries to crush them, the harder society will fight back.  

Anti-GD Georgians have been protesting nightly on Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue for nearly a whole year – a “courageous and consistent struggle”, as the opposition referred to it in their statement, though again, as in the political realm, the fight on the streets is handicapped by the lack of a leader.

Symbol vs strategy

In a speech at the 26 October rally, Tamar Chergoleishvili, one of the leaders of the opposition Federalists party, told demonstrators that “if we stand together — around values, not parties or personalities — we will certainly carry this through to the end; [the GD] regime will resign”.

It is certainly true that a shared sense of European identity and a common resistance to GD – as opposed to a loyalty to a single individual and that individual’s vision – has united and motivated street protesters in their fight so far.

But it is also true that successful, regime-toppling revolutions require organisation, coordination and, in most cases, an individual – or group of individuals – to instruct participants and streamline the many branches of dissent into a single voice of resistance.

UNM’s Levan Sanikidze, however, warns against a single figurehead “claiming ownership” of the protest movement, which he views as a “collective people’s process that cannot be led by any single man or woman”.

Giga Bokeria, another Federalists leader, is convinced protests will grow to meet demands, enduring and expanding “to the extent necessary” to make the GD regime “reconcile with defeat”.

The reality is the nightly recurrence of the Rustaveli Avenue protest has become majorly symbolic to – if not the symbol of – Georgians’ challenge and disobedience to the state attempting to repress them.

The question remains as to whether, in such a high-stakes context, peaceful street rallies are an effective resistance strategy in themselves.

Though testimony to Georgians’ fighting spirit and tenacity, the mass of arrests for blocking traffic and wearing face coverings at protests – offences GD recently made punishable by imprisonment – feel somewhat needless.

While every detention is a blow to resistors, the ruling party remains apparently unperturbed and unweakened, seemingly confident the threat of being detained or heavily fined will prevent rallies reaching anywhere near their peak size of winter 2024, when hundreds of thousands descended on Rustaveli to protest the suspension of EU membership talks.

After over 350 consecutive rallies, a night on Rustaveli without a protest would now be perceived as the failure of the whole anti-GD movement, as opposed to one strategy giving way to another – ideally something more disruptive, agile, and harder to predict – which would have the added bonus of disconcerting the ruling party and police.

The optics of the nightly resistance act do now appear to be the driving force behind its endurance.

November 28 will mark 365 days since GD’s decision to halt Georgia’s EU membership bid. It remains to be seen if, after passing the one-year mark, protesters will be willing to pivot to more direct action, or if they will continue to march peacefully on the streets each night in the hope something will change.