A constitutional crisis over the presidency escalates.
It was surely this year’s most fraught tree-lighting ceremony. Outside Georgia’s parliament building on December 14th, police squared off against thousands of protesters, as they have for the past two weeks. Inside, lawmakers from Georgian Dream, the increasingly Russia-friendly governing party, had just elected a new president in a vote with unpleasant echoes of the country’s communist past: there was only one candidate, and the tally was 224 to one. (The pro-European opposition boycotted the vote.) Now the police were tasked with clearing the street for the mayor of Tbilisi to preside over the illumination of the capital’s Christmas tree, meant to show that the government had the situation under control.
Protesters had spent the day kicking footballs around the square to ridicule the new president, Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former footballer turned hard-right populist, who played decades ago for Manchester City. Some carried their diplomas, mocking Mr Kavelashvili’s lack of a university degree, which kept him from running for head of the country’s football association in 2015. Others bore signs with the word “president” crossed out and replaced with “puppet”.
But as the deadline for the ceremony approached, the lines of police pulled back. One by one, they filed up the hill behind parliament into their buses. The tree-lighting was postponed. The government had apparently decided not to use violence to clear the square, for fear of galvanising the protests. Georgian Dream is walking a fine line: trying to crack down hard enough to discourage demonstrators, but not so brutally as to provoke an uprising of the sort that toppled Ukraine’s pro-Russian president in 2014.
The protests began on November 28th, after Irakli Kobakhidze, the prime minister, postponed negotiations on Georgia’s application to join the European Union until 2028. That catalysed anger that had been seething since a parliamentary election in October, which Georgian Dream claimed to have won but which international observers said was marred by vote-buying and ballot-stuffing. The party is in effect run by its founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire who made his money in Russia, and it has been moving Georgia towards a more Kremlin-friendly line despite widespread anti-Russian sentiment.
State officials are “toys in the hands of an oligarch”, says Mariam Kaulashvili-Southwell, founder of Daitove, an online community helping to co-ordinate the protests.
Riot police responded to the first week of demonstrations with a harsh crackdown. Tear gas formed a stinging haze throughout Tbilisi. Police picked individuals out of the crowd and beat them mercilessly. But the brutality brought more people into the streets. In the second week, tactics changed. The police sat out of sight, in idling vehicles, allowing demonstrators to disperse quietly in the early morning hours.
Meanwhile opposition politicians were assaulted outside their offices. Prominent actors and journalists were arrested. A researcher at a pro-democracy think-tank was scooped off the street by police while walking his dog, which was left tied to a tree. “Harsh repression erodes what little support still remains,” says Hans Gutbrod of Ilia State University in Tbilisi. The government needs to suppress opposition without eliciting hatred.
One risk for the government is that protests are spreading from cosmopolitan Tbilisi to the rest of the country. In Khashuri, a town of 25,000 in central Georgia, two dozen people showed up last week to protest against the suspension of EU talks. The numbers were not the important thing, said Luka Kalushvili, one of the demonstrators: “I am 25 years old, and this is the first time in my life that people came out and protested against something here.”
On December 12th organisations of IT workers, doctors, teachers and other professions mounted what was in effect a half-day strike, bringing tens of thousands into the streets. There are rumours of dissatisfaction among civil servants. The dedicated riot police who have controlled demonstrations are a small force, and it is uncertain whether the regular police would comply with orders to suppress an uprising.
But the demonstrations so far lack a charismatic leader or a clear moment of focus. Another flashpoint could come on December 29th, when Salome Zourabichvili, the outgoing president, is required by law to step down. The French-born Ms Zourabichvili, a firm pro-European, says she will refuse to go because the parliament that chose her successor was illegitimately elected. She is standing with the protesters. But Ms Zourabichvili is 72 years old, and more of a figurehead than a leader. If the government can selectively intimidate members of the opposition while letting popular anger dissipate, the protests may fizzle over the holidays. If it makes a misstep, they may yet explode. ■
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