October 27, 2024, was one of the hardest mornings for many Georgians to wake up to. November 6 wasn’t any easier. Just as the pro-Western segment of the country was piecing together the evidence of the alleged scheme behind the shock victory of the Georgian Dream, figuring out the next steps, and searching within itself for the strength to continue the struggle, the re-election of Donal Trump in the United States plunged the country into a whole new level of uncertainty. The hard question now is what it takes to save democracy in one country when democratic values are under threat elsewhere. A bigger question, however, is whether democracy will remain our main focus at all.
Here is Nini and the Dispatch newsletter, back on duty to tell you how Georgia is coping and what Georgians are hoping for.
The official preliminary results of Georgia’s October 26 parliamentary elections came too soon and hit too hard. Opposition-minded Georgians thought they were prepared for anything, including the possibility that the ruling Georgian Dream party would inflate its share of the vote just enough to secure victory, or even go so far as to simply rewrite the results to give itself the 60 percent it promised to secure. But when Giorgi Kalandarishvili, the head of the Central Election Commission, announced the first results of electronic voting from the majority of precincts two hours after the polls closed, giving GD 53%, the first instinct of exhausted voters was to simply call it a day. Suddenly, the country was in a deafening silence, occasionally disrupted by the ruling party’s celebrations, which also weren’t joyful enough to do justice to a major victory in a crucial vote. It took a while for the opposition to make an appearance, and the president didn’t comment until the next evening.
In the first 24 hours after the announcement, the country went through all five stages of grief, but in a somewhat reversed order. First came Acceptance: it felt like everyone was just accepting the fact that “this is the country we live in,” and by the same evening you could hear from everyone from frustrated Gen Z-ers to elderly taxi drivers making emigration plans. The morning after was of Depression, when everyone woke up to find out that it was not a bad dream, the hand count only increased the ruling party’s share, and the ballot count was not on the list of main concerns of the independent observation missions.
Discussions eventually moved to a Bargaining stage – what if it was too early to give up, what if one had simply been cheated, and the main battle to protect one’s vote was still ahead? Voters and observers began to sort through the evidence and recall the campaign and election day developments, slowly realizing that nothing about the election suggested that it was free and fair. Then came Anger – anger at the CEC and the ruling party for possibly rigging the election, anger at the opposition, which voters criticized for not properly preparing for possible fraud, and anger at fellow citizens who either voted for GD or allowed the alleged scheme to unfold. And finally, there was Denial – denial of the legitimacy of the official results, leading the opposition and its voters to move from grief to working on a more coherent plan of action.
We all knew…
Despite the initial confusion, and despite the fact that the official results gave GD a significant advantage over the opposition, there is now a widespread sense that the elections were stolen. Part of the reason is that while opposition parties and independent observers are rushing to gather evidence, many of us have firsthand seen, heard, or experienced various parts of the alleged rigging.
We have known for years that the government has been expanding its influence throughout the country by enrolling more struggling families in various social programs, or by using civil service employment or the creation of new public agencies to expand its network of loyalists. For years, we have known that the courts have been under government control, making it less possible for such vulnerable families to protect themselves from the increasingly influential state apparatus. We all expected the ruling party to use all this to pressure voters in a familiar campaign pattern, and there were numerous reports of this happening in recent months. Alarms were raised when the party changed election laws in August this year, giving the government more sway over the precinct commissions.
It was common knowledge that the party relied on criminal groups to run its campaigns. Vote buying by the billionaire-led party was almost taken for granted at this point. While electronic voting was known to mitigate some of the usual risks of fraud, local observers – including in their interviews with Civil.ge – warned that it still left room for the same people to vote multiple times or for someone else. In the weeks leading up to the vote, various reports of mass confiscation of IDs left many confused, but in private or social media discussions, the dominant explanation was that it was simply a way to intimidate voters by creating a sense that the government would know who they were voting for. This, and other reports that ruling party campaigners were intimidating voters by creating a sense that the secrecy of the ballot wasn’t guaranteed, led many of us to intensify the campaign that there was no way for anyone to know the voter’s choice.
A day after carefully and anxiously practicing the new voting procedure and warning my social media contacts that voter secrecy was guaranteed, I went to the polls to find out I told them a big lie: after carefully filling in the party circle on the ballot with a marker, turning the ballot upside down and placing it in a folder, I went to insert it into the automatic ballot box. The machine, however, wasn’t having it and returned the ballot at least twice, prompting the commission supervisor to intervene. But it was nearly impossible for the supervisor not to see my choice – the marker ink had left traces on the back of the ballot, clear enough for my choice to stubbornly announce itself.
…but little did we know
We all knew, but little did we know. I remember trying to downplay the apparent breach of ballot secrecy as my individual mistake, and when others massively reported the same problem, I still failed to give it the weight it deserved. It wasn’t until we knew the official results, until watchdogs presented evidence that the CEC had falsely promised to address the secrecy problem, until we all rewatched the election day violations over and over again, until there was growing evidence of carousel voting, and until a surprise ruling by one honest judge saved us from being repeatedly gaslighted by the CEC that we knew: Georgian Dream, during its 12 years of rule, has created a large and ever-growing monster that cannot be defeated by sheer wishful thinking.
The elections have left part of the country with a gnawing sense of injustice and anger that they don’t know where to channel. Some voters continue to desperately demand a “plan” from the opposition, something clear and strong enough to have at least the illusion of effect. The opposition, too, under pressure from its supporters, keeps coming up with various plans of action, including the seemingly unsustainable plan of non-stop street protests.
And today’s election victory of Donald Trump in the United States, the country that has traditionally used its influence against GD’s anti-democratic moves, could only add to the confusion. Ruling party circles are acting cheerfully, assuring each other that with Trump they may have gained an ideological ally for the next four years. Opposition circles, on the other hand, find themselves in a new wave of bargaining, trying to convince each other that the Trump administration might be more hawkish than GD would like, and recalling that it was during Trump’s first term that Georgia received its first batch of Javelin missiles.
But Javelins, as effective as they are against Russian tanks, are unlikely to be of any use in Georgians’ own struggle against their undemocratic government. The opposition and its supporters will indeed have to maintain their primary focus on securing democracy and human freedoms and come up with new strategies that are more consistent, sustainable, and perhaps less sensitive to external geopolitical shifts. Nobody says it’s going to be easy.