"Georgian Dream (GD), the ruling party in Georgia since 2012, officially received almost 1.12 million votes (53.9%) in the recent parliamentary election, while an alliance of four opposition parties ended up with 37.8%.
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The founder and honorary chairman of GD is billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia. [...] In recent years, 68-year-old Ivanishvili has begun to speak the same language as Kremlin propaganda: the world is ruled by a “War Party”; Brussels and Washington dream of Georgia opening a “second front” against Russia.
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The main political opponent of GD since 2012 has been the United National Movement (UNM) [...] All these years, the UNM has failed to seriously compete with GD: [...] Though UNM carried out successful economic and some political reforms, it also has a track record of torture in prisons, police violence and corruption.
In the recent election, the UNM (as Unity-UNM) found itself in third place (10.2%) for the first time. It was slightly outperformed (11.0%) by the Coalition for Change, made up of several parties founded by politicians who had previously been in the UNM.
The other two parties in the opposition alliance were created recently and represent the “third force” that Georgian politics has sorely lacked. Combined, they gained 16.6% of the vote.
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Georgia has a parliamentary form of government, but parliamentary democracy has yet to be formed. There has not been a single coalition government since independence. The winners of elections do not consider it necessary to listen to the opinions of the losers. The winners have been those who most effectively used political polarization to divide the country between “us” and “them."
Meanwhile, there are few political benefits for a junior partner to join a government with the winner. Both the UNM and GD, when they have needed it, have formed coalitions with small parties, before subjugating them and denying them an opportunity to share in the spoils of victory. Then the winner would fuse with the bureaucracy. That is why fistfights are more common in the Georgian parliament than meaningful debates and agreements.
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Perhaps the opposition’s “Europe or Russia” line was a mistake. For the average Georgian voter, both Europe and Russia are of secondary importance, and the opposition parties spoke little about social and economic problems, especially local ones.
The opposition never formulated an alternative vision for Georgia’s development, while its attempt to outplay GD on the issue of geopolitics was doomed. Voters have long tired of bombastic rhetoric.
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Seeing Georgia as his personal property, Ivanishvili has come to the conclusion that behind the words about democratization lies the intention of Washington and Brussels to take away his power, with vassalage to Moscow representing the only chance to avoid that.
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Now, the only question is how bloodthirsty or “vegetarian” Ivanishvili’s personalistic regime will be – whether it will resemble Russia and Belarus or Hungary and Turkey. The latter scenario allows for the opposition to hold power at the local level and for at least some independent universities, NGOs and media to endure."
