Several weeks ago, the EU Enlargement Commissioner told Georgians that “every minute counts.” Mr. Várhelyi tried to incite Georgians to do their best as the final weeks ahead of the EU’s second decision on candidacy kicked in. But in their post-vacation hangover, Georgians have taken the commissioner’s words to heart and turned every minute of the past month into a fresh, unmitigated disaster. Some would say, “The election campaign chaos starts earlier each time, doesn’t it?!” Others would (again) warn that the end is nigh. And they will have a point – all the usual signs of the apocalypse are there: the security agency, our ever-fallible Pythia, foretold the coup. The National Bank was dismembered (literally), and the government and the president exchanged notes of impeachment with a blissful abandon of Christmas Cards. The earthquake even struck to complete the impending drama of the rapture.
But let us hold off the irony, even if this is hard to do in the present climate. The turmoil left many of our citizens fearing the repeat of their worst-lived nightmare – the banking system collapse and currency crisis of the 1990s, bringing back the images of misery. But while the Georgian Lari is still struggling, the inflation is not yet galloping (thank you, Russian immigrants!). Yet, something else lost value in the meantime, a currency on which the government has heavily relied in its trade with the country’s fate. That currency is Family, with that politically capital F.
Here is Dispatch and Nini, talking about family values and the high price the country has to pay for them. Subscribe to Civil.ge newsletters here.
Family, Devalued
The concept of the family has long been the favorite sanctuary of the Georgian Dream government. Corruption scandals? Well, who wouldn’t favor their family members?! Harassments and physical attacks? What else to expect when someone disrespects their (or their patron’s) family? Flawed reforms? But the families are doing better. West-bashing?! It’s to protect from Western-imposed degradation of families.
There was always a charming family trait to fall back on for each controversy and every flaw. Everything was fine, and every sin was forgivable as long as the family’s honor was protected, a woman was a mother, a man was a father, and none of that new-fangled gender business.
The line held until the Georgian Prime Minister took his family to a place so distant that the rest couldn’t follow anymore. In its decade-long rule, the ruling Georgian Dream party survived so many corruption scandals that it appeared to become immune. But then the reports about Irakli Garibashvili’s private flight broke, and things changed.
Early in September, official sources confirmed that Garibashvili’s father had paid a wad of cash (34 thousand Euros) for the prime minister to fly his adult son on a government plane to the U.S. for the start of his term at UPenn. More precisely, the Garibashvili family must have used the plane to reach Munich, from which they continued their onward journey to the land of the free on a regular commercial flight.
The news drew much rage and many questions. How could Garibashvili’s father’s pension, or PM’s modest official salary, ever pay for such a luxury? That was merely a rhetorical question – the wealth of the prime minister’s close circle has long been no secret, and sources of his fortune have often been scrutinized. The new question here was the “why” question. WHY would he want to do such a thing in the first place? No answer that came to mind was good in the ethical sense of this word.
And there were, of course, follow-up questions: how many immediate problems an average Georgian would solve if they also had EUR 34K lying around? Or how many years of hard work would it take them in this country to save enough for the Garibashvili family’s extravagant private trip?
Even Garibashvili’s supporters wouldn’t escape such questions. After all, they also live in a country where ever more outlandish stories circulate about people taking incredible risks to reach the U.S. illegally and stay in the hope of generating some cash for their families. And who could judge those escapees when many who stayed in the country can barely afford to send their kids to modest local universities, let alone fly them privately to a fancy American college?
Silence is golden…
The ruling party must have felt something was off in how people (perhaps their own family members?!) reacted. But they made things worse in a clumsy effort to manage the damage. First came tone-deaf defenses from Garibashvili’s similarly well-off allies. “They’ve been working their whole lives, not freeloading,” MP Beka Odisharia said as he tried to explain the wealth of PM’s family. “He’s a prime minister, or do you think he’s some factory worker?” Tamaz Gaiashvili, the controversial boss of Georgian Airways, the flag carrier that operated the scandalous flight, jumped in Garibashvili’s defense. (Perhaps forgetting – somewhat too carelessly – that the big boss Bidzina Ivanishvili started as a factory worker…)
Then came a massive crackdown on drug dealers, the Georgian government’s standard operating procedure whenever it tries to salvage its reputation. Garibashvili tried to make further amends by unveiling long overdue social initiatives, including student-oriented ones. And when the internal polls did not improve, the party stuck to the tried-and-tested strategy of arguing that ex-president Saakashvili did worse things.
Saakashvili, whose rumored overindulgence in earthy pleasures has continued to live both in urban legends and prosecution files, is an easy target. But again, the tactic backfired: the ruling party only ended up identifying themselves with someone whose similar practices cost him both his career and freedom – and rightly so, as many Georgian Dream’s hardcore supporters would agree.
Dangerous liaisons
Family ties once (almost) cost Garibashvili his career before. When he abruptly quit as PM back in 2015, his own mentor and the country’s informal ruler, Bidzina Ivanishvili, recalled warning the young padawan that “his relatives would become a problem.” Ivanishvili pointed transparently to mounting allegations of nepotism in favor of his father-in-law at the time. For a moment, it felt that history might be repeating itself.
And history did repeat itself, but this time as a different kind of farce: now Ivanishvili’s relations became a problem – and a much bigger problem. Just as Garibashvili struggled to rectify his reputation, the United States sanctioned Otar Partskhaladze, a former prosecutor general and Ivanishvili family’s close associate, for allegedly trying to influence Georgian society on Moscow’s behalf.
Partskhaladze, who allegedly had a banal robbery run-in with the German justice in his younger years, became a shadowy fixer of the GD government and, having burned himself during the sole attempt to bring him into the limelight, featured in every kind of possible violent political scandal. He then found a new homeland in Russia and – journalists suspected – acted as a facilitator and a go-between for those wealthy Russians who wanted to evacuate some of their capital. The U.S. Treasury – arguably the authority on such matters – had just confirmed those suspicions. The shadowy man, with a physiognomy that does not precisely identify him as an altar boy, hardly has any fans in Georgia. Even fewer people are willing to sacrifice their financial well-being for him. Yet this is what the GD (or Ivanishvili personally?!) expects the country to do.
To spare him the sanctions, the National Bank – now seemingly under the ruling party’s thumb – went above and beyond to tailor the rules to him – just like one does for getting the family member out of trouble. Four high-ranking bank officials resigned in protest, and the hullabaloo dynamited confidence in the Georgian banking system – one of Georgia’s most stable institutional sectors. Some fear that if the National Bank forces the commercial banks to shield Partskhaladze, they are at risk of being sanctioned too. And the U.S. seems to confirm that view. The exchange of the Georgian Lari slid, and the National Bank had to burn reserves (USD 56 million) to prevent the rout.
The craze continues, with new layers and puzzles added to it every day. The stress is far from over. And the “why” question, too, remains: with every passing week, it gets harder to make sense of shocks, sacrifices, and losses that could have been avoided, that seem to be made solely to save Partskhaladze and shield “the family.” And thus, the concept that the ruling party keeps obsessing about slowly turns from a unifying concept of the Family, into an exclusive and alienating one of “la famiglia.”
Perhaps, sooner or later, more Georgians will realize that family and family values could indeed stand in the way of their aspired future with the EU and their future in general. But not their own families, and not their values, either.
