In what has become a tradition, new years in Georgia begin before January 1. The year 2023 began on December 29, 2022, when People’s Power, the far-right offshoot of Georgian Dream, first announced that it would introduce a law on foreign agents. And 2024 started on December 30, 2023, when Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili – two weeks after Georgia was granted the long-awaited EU candidate status – ominously announced his comeback to formal politics in what would become a harbinger of many other unfortunate returns.
Now, as 2024 draws to a close, what is the event that will inaugurate 2025? Is it sanctioning Ivanishvili on the anniversary of his third coming? Or the departure of President Zurabishvili from her residence into a broader resistance? Or Georgian Dream Mikheil Kavelashvili enacting a myriad of repressive laws on the day of his widely boycotted inauguration? Or whatever will happen on the announced New Year’s Eve protest night on December 31?
With only a few hours to go before the end of the most endless year, there is a feeling that something could still happen to turn the context of the ever-shacking country upside down. And while we are holding our breath, here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter to recount Georgia’s very dramatic 2024 – a year of deaths, rebirths, footballs, and many, many fireworks.
Winter
2024 saw the emergence of new, unprecedented waves of protest movements, and January offered a small preview of decentralized, self-organized resistance. The streets of Tbilisi witnessed dramatic scenes in late January, as several debt-ridden families risked being left homeless in the winter cold, facing eviction under a predatory lending system. The fierce protests at least succeeded in keeping the families in their homes and spurred broader discussions about the overall fairness of existing practices.
- Despite reforms, debts and evictions plague Georgians
- Dispatch – January 28: The winter of our discontent
But the usual political drama soon took over.
In February, after years of hard and dark work, Irakli Kobakhidze was blessed with the post of prime minister, while his predecessor, Irakli Garibashvili, was dethroned to party chairmanship and eventually pushed into the shadows. The appointment of the Janus-faced Kobakhidze over the conservative and hardline Garibashvili was expected to mean a more constructive approach to the West, and in the beginning, the new prime minister did indeed seem to be practicing a smile on his previously unemotional face.
Spring
But Kobakhidze’s half-smiling face soon returned to its usual cynical scold as spring came, the sun shone, and his party began rolling out one repressive policy after another.
First, there was the anti-LGBT law to counter what they claimed was Western-led “LGBT propaganda” among children. Initially, however, it was meant to be a “constitutional law”. Since GD didn’t have a constitutional majority, the bill seemed to be simply designed to further ruin the already fragmented opposition during the election campaign in case they failed to join the gay-bashing in the face of a conservative electorate.
The opposition, however, proved wise enough to portray political homophobia as a mere distraction and instead began to proactively focus on “real issues”. Well, not all of the opposition – the four MPs from the libertarian Girchi decided to make a deal with Georgian Dream to help the ruling party elect a chairman of the Central Election Commission in exchange for abolishing the 1:4 quota for women on parliamentary party lists.
And then came the real distraction and a rare occasion of celebrating unity: the Georgian national football team made history by qualifying for the European Cup for the first time after two tense playoff games. Georgian cities erupted in jubilation, and for about a week the country experienced an almost forgotten spell of joy and unity.
It remains a matter of speculation whether it was this unity that frightened the ruling party or whether the cruel announcement had been planned beforehand – but on April 3, GD said it would reintroduce the Foreign Agents Law, despite a clear pledge never to bring it back after it had been withdrawn last March in response to the mass protests. At the same time, the GD rushed in an obscure law making it easier to bring offshore assets into Georgia.
When the party began to push the bill through hearings, Georgians met it with the same vehemence as the year before. The GD, however, was prepared to wait it out, repeatedly using excessive police force against demonstrators but also countering protests with arrests and what appeared to be state-sponsored thuggery against activists and politicians. This, in turn, sparked what many saw as an unprecedented mobilization, with days of rallies with scales unseen followed by periods of smaller but vibrant youth-led marches. Student mobilization also brought protests outside Tbilisi.
But vibrant and long protests proved insufficient to stop the bill. As the GD succeeded in adopting it, President Salome Zurabishvili—whose popularity among anti-government protesters was skyrocketing week by week—called for shifting a focus on the crucial October 26 parliamentary elections, which she framed as a referendum on the country’s choice between Europe and Russia.
- Dispatch – May 22: Catcher in the Rye
- Parliament Overrides President’s Veto on Foreign Agents Law, Adopts the Agents’ Law
- Georgians Gear Up for ‘Unprecedented’ Election Mobilization
Summer
The hot summer months brought another wave of football fever to heal the spring wounds. The national team delivered a historic performance at the European Cup, miraculously making it to the knockout stages at the first attempt, with Georgian players drawing international admiration and topping various rankings.
But the celebrations could not make up for what had happened before. In the summer months, EU diplomats came to confirm that Georgia’s European integration process had been halted, while some of the aid for the government had been frozen.
And as the election campaign slowly entered its most intense phase, the ruling Georgian Dream party decided to rally support by promising destruction. GD announced it would seek a constitutional majority to ban opposition parties, a further crackdown on LGBT rights, restore territorial integrity (without detailing how), and proclaim Orthodox Christianity as the state religion. However, the party had to withdraw the latter promise immediately after the top Orthodox clergy made it clear that they were satisfied with the (ample) privileges the church already enjoyed and didn’t seek further dependence on the state; thank you kindly!
The Georgian summer of 2024 also saw a major labor action, as thousands of employees of Evolution Georgia, an online casino known as Georgia’s top student employer, went on strike to demand a pay raise and better working conditions. As the year draws to a close the strike remains unresolved.
Fall
The fall in Georgia didn’t start well and it didn’t end well. Even the Georgian national football team, which had been a cause of unity and joy earlier in the year, struggled to win its qualifying matches, damaging its chances of repeating miracles in the future. And to the great disappointment of many fans, some of the national team players openly supported the Georgian Dream during the campaign. So did the Olympic champions, who won gold for Georgia in Paris in the summer, only to alienate their fans later by landing on GD’s party lists.
And September turned out to be particularly dramatic and full of misery. On September 2, the deadline passed for foreign-funded civil society organizations to register as foreign agents. Over 400 CSOs applied for registration, while most of those meant to be targeted by the law boycotted it. With only a few hours left until 2025, the law is still hanging over the heads of civic activists, but the blade hasn’t fallen quite yet.
It was also in September that protesters from the village of Shukruti in the western Georgian mining community of Chiatura had to come to Tbilisi after months of efforts to get fair compensation for their destroyed homes and orchards yielded little. Two months of hunger strikes and rallies in Tbilisi did not help either, prompting the Chiatura protesters to return to their village to continue their protests.
September was also the month that Georgian Dream passed a repressive anti-LGBT law without waiting for a “constitutional majority.” The law, which took effect on December 2, cracks down on freedom of assembly and expression for queer people, imposes curbs on gender reassignment and recognition procedures, and introduces censorship for wider fields, including media and academia. The day after the law’s final reading, Kesaria Abramidze, Georgia’s best-known transgender woman, was brutally murdered with dozens of stab wounds by an ex-boyfriend.
AND THEN CAME OCTOBER, a month of crucial parliamentary elections that the opposition framed as a Russia-vs-Europe choice, while Georgian Dream continued to portray it as a choice between war and peace or traditional values and “LGBT propaganda.” In Georgia’s first fully proportional election with a 5% threshold, the opposition tried to challenge Georgian Dream by forming four major alliances.
The opposition hoped that growing dissatisfaction with the government would help them overcome the unfavorable position created by widespread reports of vote buying, voter intimidation, use of administrative resources, and controversial legislative changes to the electoral code by Georgian Dream.
That didn’t happen – when official results gave Georgian Dream a safe victory of up to 54%, opposition voters were left in shock and apathy. Eventually, mounting evidence of fraud and mass violations of voting secrecy led the opposition and President Zurabishvili to boycott the results as illegitimate. The authorities’ failure to address possible violations also indefinitely delayed Western recognition of the new parliament, except for a few exceptions. Opposition-led protests demanding a revote went on for weeks but failed to reach the scale and fervor of the spring demonstrations. It all culminated on November 25, one of the most depressing days to pass by Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue, when Georgian Dream recognized the powers of the parliament, where it continues to sit alone.
The protesters went home frustrated and exhausted, trying to figure out how to live with a regime that doesn’t hide its authoritarian ambitions. But then came November 28.
… and Winter Again
Georgia’s great hot’n’cold winter of 2024 began on November 28, when Georgian Dream Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s announcement to halt the EU accession process triggered what many consider to be the largest wave of protests in the history of independent Georgia, attracting various social, professional, and demographic groups, and spreading to up to 40 towns and cities.
At the time of the announcement, Brussels had already frozen Georgia’s EU integration, and Georgian Dream didn’t seem to be trying hard to reverse it. But the blatant statement seemed to give Georgians the spark they needed (and the elections failed to provide) to express their long-held discontent and take to the streets in another wave of decentralized resistance.
The first phase of the protests was met with heavy-handed police response. That included the excessive use of tear gas and water cannons and police brutality against detained demonstrators and media workers, in the scale of abuse that experts qualified as torture. More than 400 people were arrested, many of them beaten, and more than 80 were hospitalized as a result. More than 40 remain in jail, facing criminal charges and possibly years in prison. Protesters responded to police violence with fireworks, and fierce exchanges of gas-vs-fireworks lit up Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue for several consecutive days before authorities cracked down on the sale of pyrotechnics.
The protests then slowly entered another phase. Georgian Dream’s intensified police repression, thug violence, and door-knocking were met with non-stop marches and gatherings in Georgia’s major cities as protesters celebrated unity and expressed discontent in various creative ways. While Georgian Dream introduced repressive laws to crack down on freedom of assembly and expression and to put pressure on GD-critical officials, protesters organized themselves into professional, geographical, and other groups, collectively danced Khorumi, a martial folk dance, and stood in a massive human chain in various cities.
- Dispatch – December 24: When Georgia Marched
- Explainer | Facing Resistance, Georgian Dream Rushes in Repressive Laws
No police officers have been held accountable for human rights violations. As December progressed, various Western countries – including the U.S. and U.K. – imposed a series of sanctions on those responsible for human rights abuses amid protests, including top MIA officials. The series culminated in the U.S. Treasury Department imposing economic sanctions on Georgian Dream’s founder and honorary chairman, Bidzina Ivanishvili, about a month after Washington said it was suspending its strategic partnership with Georgia. As the sanctions continue, Georgia ends 2024 fearing an economic crisis, with thousands of businesses openly supporting protests and calling for new elections.
And Georgia ends the year with another series of football matches – this time on Rustaveli Avenue, as a protest performance against Georgian Dream’s election of ex-footballer Mikheil Kavelashvili as Georgia’s sixth president. Kavelashvili was sworn in on December 29 in an isolated, closed-door event inside the parliament building. On the same day, Salome Zurabishvili, whom the protesters continue to see as their legitimate president and representative, made a decision to hand over the presidential palace to Kavelashvili but vowed to continue the resistance along with the people, saying that she was “taking legitimacy with her.”
Zurabishvili will be joining the protesters on Rustaveli Avenue for a “New Year’s Magic Protest Night” on December 31 to meet 2025 together.
Best of Times, Worst of Times
“Did you die, though?” was the question with which we concluded our last year’s review, and while we are tempted to repeat the question, the answer now seems different – Georgia did die, it kept dying, and yet it did so with a parallel sense of something new coming to life. The coming months and years will show whether 2024 was the year when the republic really died in Georgia or the year when it was truly (re)born.
Bidding farewell to the probably most dramatic year in decades, Georgia meets its two Christmases and two New Years with two presidents, political and economic uncertainty, fears, and hopes. The country says goodbye to a year in which fireworks were set off in anger and in celebration, in which football came to signify the nation’s highest achievements and its lowest downfalls.
And as Georgia’s most open-ended year draws to a close, we too say goodbye until after the Orthodox Christmas holidays, knowing that our review barely did justice to everything the country went through in 2024. But we tried our best – and will continue trying. Season’s Greetings!