The ruling party is growing more repressive as it draws from Vladimir Putin’s playbook. If the opposition is to push back successfully, they must first unify.
By Giorgi Meladze and Nadia Asaad
July 2025
With Georgia’s opposition parties voted out of Parliament at their own request while they demand new elections, with the European Union also calling for a fresh vote while declaring the new Georgian government illegitimate, and with seven major opposition figures jailed and more awaiting arrest, Georgian democracy is now no longer so much backsliding as tumbling headlong into an abyss. The ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party is systematically dismantling electoral competition. The democracy and rights watchdog agency of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has not been invited to observe the 4 October 2025 local-government elections, further media regulations are limiting journalistic freedoms, and the government is targeting observation organizations with the newly enforced “Russian Law” (also known as the Foreign Agents Law) that makes monitoring virtually impossible.
This Georgian law is modeled on measures that President Vladimir Putin first launched in Russia in 2015 and expanded as recently as 2024. The aim in both countries is the same: to stop civil society groups that the state deems “undesirable” from receiving foreign funds. Georgia’s new Foreign Agents Law has been the single biggest factor in the recent avalanche of antidemocratization that threatens to bury hopes for free government in this small post-Soviet republic on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.
All the achievements of Georgia’s young democracy are now in jeopardy. Since the October 2024 parliamentary election that GD hopelessly warped with fraud, intimidation, and violence, the party has seen its domestic and international legitimacy drain away. Mass protests demanding a new election have been met with harsh crackdowns, leaving hundreds injured and dozens detained on dubious charges. Under the influence of its billionaire leader, former premier Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD has tightened its grip on power through state capture, political persecution, aggressive propaganda, and tactics reminiscent of Russian authoritarianism.
The international reaction to this includes EU sanctions on GD officials plus a bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and now before the Senate called the MEGOBARI Act (the acronym means “friend” in Georgian). This proposed law would target both public and private persons and entities deemed complicit in democratic backsliding. Against this background of domestic protest and international condemnation, with aggressive rhetoric dominating political discourse, Georgia’s opposition parties remain divided and cannot seem to form a united front. With the June 2025 jailing of leaders Nika Gvaramia, Badri Japaridze, Zurab Japaridze, Mamuka Khazaradze, Nika Melia, Giorgi Vashadze, and Givi Targamadze, the opposition now must face the worst crisis of capacity since the run-up to the 2003 Rose Revolution.
The crisis reaches deeper than a single stolen election or act of ruling-party overreach. Rather, it can be traced to a profound, elite-driven polarization that has corroded trust in institutions, fueled public cynicism, and fractured Georgian society into rival blocs that bitterly distrust one another. This pattern echoes regional trends, but past episodes of successful civic mobilization offer hope for reversing democratic decline. With elections on the horizon, a coordinated resistance is vital if Georgia is to push back against its authoritarian slide.
Postelection Repression
“Competitive authoritarianism” as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way describe it, is a type of hybrid regime in which democratic institutions remain but are manipulated to entrench incumbents. This is the strategy that is driving Georgia’s slide away from democracy. Elections, the legislative and judicial branches, and the media are subverted in function, disabling accountability and hollowing out democratic competition to produce a polarized society in which opposition to incumbents cannot effectively mobilize. Under GD, Georgia is visibly on this trajectory. From control of state resources to the use of polarizing rhetoric to stigmatize dissent, political competition is being weaponized.
The OSCE, the EU, and the Council of Europe have criticized the 2024 election for unequal competition, a climate of intimidation, and around 245,000 fraudulent ballots. In the aftermath, GD halted EU-accession talks and rapidly passed repressive legislation modeled after Russia’s “metodichki” or government diktats regarding how public matters are to be discussed.
Adopting a playbook akin to Hungary’s “salami tactics,” GD has incrementally dismantled checks on its power. It abolished the independent investigative mechanism that was created in 2022 to look into abuses by law enforcement. It passed the Foreign Agents Law, framing it as an anticorruption measure but really wanting it for use against any activist, nongovernmental organization, or independent media outlet found troublesome by GD. The law carries fines of up to US$3,600 and prison sentences of up to five years.
Other laws expanded police powers, criminalized common protest tactics — imposing a $730 fine for wearing face coverings and $1,800 for blocking roads in a country where the average person only makes about $800 a month — and increased penalties for criticizing officials, including on social media. An effort to outlaw GD’s old rival, the United National Movement founded by imprisoned former president Mikheil Saakashvili, resulted in the streamlining of procedures for banning political parties. At the same time, GD introduced selective welfare measures such as a doubling of judges’ salaries, mimicking a tactic that authoritarian incumbents such as Putin use to reinforce the loyalty of key groups.
When mass protests broke out after the 2024 parliamentary election, demonstrators and members of opposition parties were brutally targeted, even at their homes. High-profile arrests of opposition leaders have been carried out on the pretext of refusal to cooperate with investigations. Most of the leaders of the party known as Lelo (its full name means loosely “score one for Georgia”) are currently serving seven- or eight-month prison terms, with the possibility of more time behind bars looming since every summons to testify before the government’s investigative commission carries the threat of an added one-year sentence for noncompliance.
Amid this growing repression, however, there is reason for hope. A younger generation using a decentralized model of civic resistance has emerged as a force for change. Data collected by the Caucasus Research Resource Center–Georgia and Caucasian House reveal that most Georgians aged 18 to 29 are politically active and have recently become even more invested, standing at the fore in protests against the Foreign Agents Law. Still, for the protests to become effective, the opposition will have to agree on a unified strategy. In particular, a split over whether to adopt more confrontational tactics or seek negotiations with GD must be settled, as must the debate over whether contesting or boycotting the upcoming local elections is the best course.
To Boycott or Not to Boycott?
The debate about whether to take part in or boycott local-government elections is one of the most serious disputes splitting the opposition today. The leading advocate of participation has arguably been Lelo, but the jailing of that party’s top leaders has left its voice uncertain. The boycott side now seems to have the momentum, a token of the grave frustration that many Georgians feel when they contemplate an electoral system so widely viewed as compromised beyond repair. Years of rigged contests, judicial capture by entrenched clans, and election commissions wholly subservient to the ruling party have convinced many oppositionists that spending time and energy on local elections will be futile. Is not the key, they ask, the demand for renewed elections to the national legislature? Parliament, not local councils, is the crucial venue.
Civil society is also split on whether to vote or boycott this October. Casting voting as a form of protest, opinion makers lean toward participation. Grassroots activists, by contrast, radically oppose the idea. These latter argue that with clear signs of manipulation already in view, lending legitimacy to rigged elections by voting in them is walking into a trap. The questions of how to confront government violence and electoral fraud and whether there are resources to do it, remain open. Meanwhile, GD satellite parties and a number of former GD figures advance conflicting strategies that fracture unity and weaken the prospects for coordinated resistance.
The 69-year-old Ivanishvili’s wealth is estimated at about $8 billion, making him worth the equivalent of a quarter of Georgia’s entire Gross Domestic Product. This enormous financial clout backs an entire ecosystem of political groups, government-organized “nongovernmental” organizations, and media outlets that push whatever line Ivanishvili wants them to push. In 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned him for corruption, obstruction of accountability, and the facilitating of Russian influence in Georgia.
The Path Forward: Unity and Resistance
The opposition fragmentation of 2024 stemmed both from Georgia’s historical tendency toward elite-centric polarization and from GD’s deliberate efforts to reshape the political field to its own advantage. Yet Georgia showed two decades ago that opposition splits can be overcome: During the 2003 Rose Revolution, diverse political forces united behind a shared demand for democratic reform known as the “Ten Steps Toward Liberty” platform. This laid down a clear route to change and galvanized widespread civic participation. The country had proved that even in a fractured environment, a unified strategy anchored in clear goals can defeat entrenched power.
One of the coauthors of the present essay has argued that opposition unity, alongside mass turnout, effective election monitoring, and a strong nonpartisan movement are the keys to success. Lacking these, resistance tends to become performative and accomplishes little more than turning participants into targets for future crackdowns. Georgia’s democratic renewal, if it comes, will require sustained solidarity, disciplined strategy, and the political imagination to break with the past.
Giorgi Meladze is an associate professor at Ilia State University School of Law in Tbilisi, and an invited lecturer at European Humanities University. Nadia Asaad is a journalist and researcher working with Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies and a graduate student at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po).
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Mirian Meladze/Anadolu via Getty Images
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