“Election? What election? It’s a joke.” This response I got already at Istanbul airport, during the obligatory midnight transfer to Tbilisi, about a month before the first round of the Georgian presidentials. It poignantly illustrates the weariness and disillusion among many educated, young Georgians. It hardly helps that the president-to-be, through pending constitutional changes, will not have any real power, even on paper — but the resentment goes deeper. In a revealing metaphor, I’ve been told the election compares to having to choose between staying in a destructive relationship and getting back with the ex you dumped.
Behind this characterization stands billionaire oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili’s vaguely populist party, Georgian Dream, vs. the ragged remains of the vaguely pro-European party of exiled former president Mikheil Saakashvili.
Saakashvili was zealously lauded in the West when he came to power back in 2003 for presenting a clean break with Georgia’s past, replacing the Russia-leaning, Sovietesque, dysfunctional and thoroughly corrupt regime of Eduard Shevardnadze, who was ousted amid mass protests for rigging the elections – he was then duly convicted of state crime and fled to Russia. Of course, Shevardnadze had, little more than a decade earlier, received all the same praise in the West as Gorbachev’s foreign minister for helping to peacefully put an end to the Cold War. The events that were to follow do seem to have some irony to them, for Saakashvili in turn lost an election partly on corruption charges some ten years later; then, in good order, he was convicted of state crime, fled to the Ukraine and redeployed his maverick political career there (till again he got kicked out). It may be that power corrupts, or maybe the post-Soviet saviour figure is just another case of Western media’s penchant for a good narrative. (Oh, and some Western politicians did follow suit, becoming rather heavily involved in preserving Saakashvili’s reputation.)
This October, for the first election round, Tbilisi poster space was filled to the brim, politicians (there were many of them) temporarily replacing the casinos on the city’s billboards. For the second round, in a move that seemed to reek of desperation, just about every inch had been bought up by Ivanishvili, turning the city into a sea of big smiling faces; well, apart from the huge scaremongering portraits of the ‘enemy’, tactically attributed not to Georgian Dream but to some more radical supporter party. It’s unclear if anyone believes the giant posters to actually have an effect; maybe they’re just for show, an overblown façade of those Western attributes that are supposed to accompany an election (like a cargo-cult of democracy).
In what seems a classic case of vote-buying, Ivanishvili apparently paid off debts for some 600 000 uncreditworthy Georgians; that’s quite a few percentage points in a country of 3.7 million, especially considering the turnout hovers somewhere around 50 percent, and people in debt statistically not (otherwise) among the voters. Word on the street is there are also free bus rides to the booth for supporters (this is crucial in rural areas, but also for the very many Tbilisians who are registered in their ancestral hometowns); and at the stick end of the deal is the threat of losing your public sector job if you show the wrong sympathies, since Ivanishvili’s government may also happen to be your employer.
So it came as a surprise that Ivanishvili’s candidate – the blundering French-born Salome Zurabishvili – nevertheless not only failed to hit a strike in the first round, but actually came head-to-head with the runner-up. Even Ivanishvili ended up admitting this was sending a message. Salome seems to have been too much even for populism to swallow. One comes to think Ivanishvili may have been making a gamble for pro-European votes by fielding a decidedly European candidate. But not only did Salome fail to become popular in pro-European circles because of her repeated displays of incompetence, Ivanishvili’s traditionalist supporters should be want to balk at the foreign-born woman’s apparent lack of ‘Georgianness’ – not speaking Georgian properly and with an apparent lack of knowledge of the country, contributing to numerous gaffes.
The event is filled with contradiction, like it is operating on a different order of logic, one where you are just supposed to appreciate the absurdity. Confusion seems to be the weapon of choice for both sides, with an endless array of smokescreens that make voters either bewildered or frustrated. So the Georgian Dream posters conspicuously sport the European Union flag (like just about every public building does, weird enough) – but anyhow they have the support of the anti-European traditionalists. The biggest opposition candidate, Grigol Vashadze, who chairs the remains of Saakashvili’s old party, is variously slandered as both Western puppet and KGB spy (he is old enough to have been part of the Soviet nomenklatura).
Both of the top candidates have served as foreign minister under Saakashvili’s presidency. And another of Saakashvili’s foreign ministers, Davit Bakradze, came third in the first round, chairing a splinter group off of Saakashvili’s party. (Then again, Saakashvili served as justice minister under Shevardnadze, so this does seem to be a thing. And Saakashvili himself remains the most confusing figure of them all.)
The break-up of the Saakashvili party happened because of differences with Saakashvili himself (operating from Europe) over his orders to boycott parliament – and the question of the continuing chairmanship of the exiled ex-president. The greater part of his party simply left him. Yet it is the relatively young Bakradze who is considered the diplomat, and in terms of personality the much older Vashadze seems to be rather his opposite. Indeed, there’s the feeling the latter got to be Saakashvili’s candidate simply because nobody else wanted – the only one still loyal enough to Saakashvili to run as his placeholder. Yet he got a lot more votes than Bakradze in the first round. And so the second round is, on one level, fought between a European-born woman and a moustache-wielding, loud-mouthed Soviet holdover. On another level, it is fought between a pro-European candidate and an emissary of the éminence grise – but which is which?
Add to this muddle a bunch of last-minute scandals and mudslinging which really there seems to be no use trying to make sense of, as well as various accusations of vote-rigging. Again, the principal issues of the day seem to involve tying the other side to corruption scandals – either that or the symbolic politics of real or imagined positions on the Russia-occupied territories and the historiography of the disastrous 2008 war with Russia (which arguably was what started Saakashvili’s downfall). In the background looms, of course, the broader ideological debate of Westernization vs. traditionalism, but without any clear lines of battle. The country’s persisting socioeconomic problems seem to be of secondary importance to all.
To many, many Georgians, election day means a day off from work.
Tbilisi Flipsides 