In the Name of Peace: Georgia’s Postelection Crisis and Current Mass Protests

Parliament building, November 2024. Photo courtesy of George Shvelidze.

Postelection Numbness

Despite relentless protests of unprecedented scale in the spring of 2024, Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, forced through the so-called Foreign Agents Law, perceived as a direct assault on Georgia’s civil society and European integration process.1 The rigid stance of an increasingly authoritarian and fascist-leaning government left protesters utterly disillusioned. However, collective frustration soon led to civic mobilization around the parliamentary elections of October 26 as the last hope for institutionalized political change. Despite the government’s tightening grip on power, the prospect of fair elections became a rallying point for various civil society groups, political activists, and ordinary people alike. There was a shared collective feeling that the electoral process could either preserve some semblance of Georgia’s democratic face and functioning or seal the country’s slide into full-fledged authoritarianism.

This hope proved brutally optimistic. Against people’s stubborn and enthusiastic engagement in grassroots work to ensure the democratic transition of power, the Georgian Dream government astutely weaponized peace rhetoric together with an anti-gender (anti-LGBT) narrative. In this way, it aimed to manipulate the nation’s collective trauma from previous wars with Russia as well as fears of losing “national identity” in the face of “globalist forces.” Central to their strategy was framing their opponents as warmongers who would inevitably drag Georgia into another devastating conflict. The ruling party flooded the public sphere with propaganda to provoke fear, producing billboards in cities across the country in which images of war-torn Ukraine were juxtaposed with idyllic, peaceful Georgia. Under the guise of peace, the government rigged the election and claimed a decisive victory amid widespread allegations of electoral fraud.

The elections left the country in an odd, liminal state of neither triumph nor public dissent but instead an overwhelming numbness in the face of profound uncertainty. The more apparent it became that the elections had been systemically rigged—through intimidation, bribery, carousel voting, breach of secrecy, and other mechanisms involving the concerted unlawful effort of state institutions—the more untrustworthy the election results became. While claiming to have secured 54 percent of the vote, i.e., the highest electoral success in its twelve-year history, Georgian Dream seemed suspiciously reluctant to celebrate its “victory” on election night or after. A honk here, a firework there—and then Tbilisi fell into an eerie silence, leaving quite a few foreign journalists and “protest tourists” craving the familiar political spectacle of an outburst of anti-government rage.

The feeling that Georgian Dream’s legitimacy hung in the air deepened as opposition parties domestically and democratic countries abroad refused to recognize the election results. Yet the opposition proved incapable of bringing large swaths of people into the streets to protest against elections that most people knew had been manipulated. Apathetic frustration was again the predominant reaction when, adding insult to injury, Ivanishvili nominated an odious far-right ex-footballer from Georgian Dream’s proxy party as the next presidential candidate. This decision was widely seen as another blatant and cynical demonstration of arbitrary one-man rule over a country clinging to democracy. Many had already started bracing for a slow civic resistance to the creeping advance of authoritarianism. Amid the frustration, the only glimmer of hope was Georgia’s European horizon, remaining formally open despite seeming increasingly distant. On November 28, even this fragile hope was crushed after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared that Georgia’s European integration and negotiations with the EU on the accession process would be halted at least until 2028.

Kobakhidze’s declaration reignited simmering tensions and anxieties, exposing the underlying crisis of legitimacy. An unprecedented wave of protests spontaneously erupted nationwide and continues to gain traction. Since this pivotal moment, Georgian Dream’s increasingly violent repression and its reckless dismantling of institutional integrity—dragging state structures into dysfunction, disgrace, and paralysis—have turned collective mobilization into an existential imperative. The protests have transcended the immediate goal of safeguarding Georgia’s Western orientation and EU integration process, becoming instead a broader struggle to uphold the very foundations of democracy, statehood, justice, and common decency.

A Protest and Its Many Senses

On the evening of November 28, Tbilisi’s iconic Rustaveli Avenue, long a stage for historic protests, witnessed the emergence of an entirely new political body of protesters. It was a body marked by a novel multi-medial and multisensory language of rage, hope, and togetherness, a vibrant amalgam of voices, images, and sounds. One of us was standing there when people from all corners of the city started slowly flocking toward the Parliament building in desperation, resembling a ritual of collective mourning over their country. Soon, this muffled mourning was replaced by the ominous sound of people banging on the metal fences the police had erected around the Parliament, converging with the high-pitched tune of whistles and screams. Cutting through this sustained noise were fireworks fired at the parliament, currently the symbol of all political ills that befall the nation. Eye-piercing green lasers started to dot its walls and helped protesters blind police forces ready to crack down on the crowd.

Next to this nonverbal expression of rage, one could hear the endless political chatter of tens of thousands of people spontaneously assembling in groups dispersed across the entire avenue. Instead of the usual central stage dominated by preselected speakers talking into a sound system, people chose to reclaim the avenue in various portions and through multiple media. On the upper facade of the parliament, a moving news ticker provided a clear, concise articulation of all the demands and sentiments born by this headless crowd: the call for new elections; the release of hundreds of protesters illegally detained and brutally beaten during the previous two weeks; solidarity from and to demonstrations in other cities; the display of the names of those involved in violent crackdowns; jokes about Georgian Dream politicians; and much more. Later in the night, Rustaveli Avenue and the adjacent streets often became a battlefield between police forces equipped with tear gas, water cannons, and rubber bullets and protesters who defended themselves with gas masks and barricades cobbled together from trash bins and benches, while launching fireworks in return.

The Georgian Dream government failed to crush dissent through technologically advanced methods. Random kidnappings, beatings, and detentions proved equally in vain for neutralizing the alleged “leaders” and “instigators” of a genuinely headless movement. Ultimately, the ruling party started deliberately blurring the line between legal and illegal violence by mobilizing the infamous titushky, para- and extralegal goons, to assault protesters; most alarmingly, it has started incorporating these thugs into the state apparatus while firing dissenting public servants. In this way, dismantling state institutions has become Georgian Dream’s principal means of preserving power.

However, the more unrestrained the war of a rogue government on its people becomes, the more firmly the protesters respond. Rushing to the streets in even greater numbers after every night of terror, they bring food and drinks to share; they sing and chant as if exorcising the fear and stress that everyone feels; they relish the sheer physical joy of standing together with tens of thousands of others. The protests are expanding organically as people mobilize through their professional networks, sectors, and shared concerns—spreading across multiple cities, localities, and different times of day. At the same time, there is growing awareness that if the protest is to be sustainable in the long run and spread to most professions, a general strike would and should be the most efficient peaceful tool of resistance. Theatre and IT workers have already set a precedent. However, for people like construction workers, notwithstanding some waving in solidarity at marching protesters, going on strike may prove much more difficult due to the lack of institutional safety nets. Hence, even those who had spent years denigrating and institutionally dismantling strikes as a means of political action have gradually started to admit how difficult it is to organize a strike in Georgia’s legal and economic conditions. The left-leaning voices in this many-headed movement emphasize that in an overindebted society, the cycle of monthly loan payments is a significant obstacle to joining a strike and thus call for debt pauses and strike funds.

Besides demanding new elections under a politically neutral administration, the release of those illegally detained by the regime, and the punishment of those ordering and executing attacks against citizens, the movement is organically engendering a more general desire for systemic change. This desire is expressed in calls for social justice, associated with the idea of a European welfare state, and for demolishing the repressive state apparatus. Far from constituting a distant goal to be achieved after democracy’s victory over Georgian Dream’s authoritarianism, the active foregrounding of such pressing issues as overindebtedness is perceived as a strategic, immediate necessity for the movement to sustain and expand itself.

A construction worker waving the Georgian flag in solidarity with the march of IT and HR workers on December 13. Photo courtesy of George Shvelidze.

Beyond the Maidan Paradigm

This multi-medial and multisensory language of protest frustrates Georgian Dream’s apparent strategy for taming it. The party is fully invested in framing the demonstrations not as genuine expressions of civic indignation but as a second “Maidan,” or an orchestrated attempt by internal and external enemies to destabilize the nation. The Maidan paradigm, part of Georgian Dream’s fear-mongering tactics, aims to consolidate disputed power by stirring public anxiety about, and the injured memories of, the Georgian Civil War of the 1990s. Symptomatically, as obsessed as Georgian Dream is with the idea that political contestation to its rule can only unfold according to the Ukraine scenario, the party is manipulative enough to put the emphasis not so much on the episode when Yanukovich’s government was forced to flee, but on what came afterwards: the Russian invasion. Knowing all too well that, if ousted from power, their rule will not be missed, Georgian Dream’s propaganda systematically evokes the geopolitical aftermath of Maidan in order to paralyze the growing protests, aiming to blackmail them into submission. In the name of peace, geopolitics is once again presented as a legitimate excuse for suspending democracy and crushing a popular struggle.

While the protest unfolds according to its own logic, the government’s response seems to rest entirely on anti-Maidan measures. Government-controlled media disseminate narratives about the opposition planning to sacrifice peaceful protesters to further fuel a protest otherwise destined to wane. They fabricate stories of organized crime groups and thugs who, in reality, act under the protection of the police, making Georgian streets already known for their tormenting traffic and infrastructural decay, as well as being physically threatening spaces. When, in response, volunteer civic groups of young men emerge to protect demonstrators, they are quickly labelled by propaganda media as far-right thugs or “Nazis,” indispensable rhetorical signifiers of any Maidan-like scenario. Even the recent ban on wearing masks in public reveals that Georgian Dream itself is keen on repeating Yanukovich’s moves to curb the 2013–14 protests, not to mention Kobakhidze’s declaration about the suspension of EU integration, which mimics Yanukovich’s refusal to sign the EU association agreement.

In this way, Tbilisi and other Georgian cities have emerged as post-truth spaces, fabricated Maidans without a real Maidan. Georgian Dream seems incapable of legitimizing and consolidating its fragile power without conjuring the Maidan plot. However, protests in Georgia fundamentally subvert this conjured narrative of Maidan as the singular node of unrest. Protesters have embraced spatial commoning, organizing in various parts of Tbilisi and beyond and claiming urban spaces or public institutions as sites of collective agency. Well aware of how Georgian Dream is keen on instigating Maidan-like processes to more assuredly neutralize them, protesters spontaneously invent counter-practices, embodying a decentralized approach that not only defies attempts to cast the protests as violent or unruly but also reflects a broader ideological departure from the zero-sum, insurgent fervor that Georgian Dream seeks to impose on the public imagination. The more Georgian Dream tries to sow fear and chaos, to “Maidanize” the political process, the more emphatically the protest demands a return to functional state institutions, adherence to the constitutional framework, and new elections as the only institutionalized way to solve the crisis. This emphasis on legality directly challenges Georgian Dream’s narrative of looming anarchy. It underscores that the protests are not a rebellion against the state but a defense of its democratic principles—a collective insistence on governance that serves the people rather than corrupt political interests.

Unity in the Face of Division

Divide and rule is a classic political strategy to tame the public. It is not hard to observe that the Georgian Dream government has continually borrowed this strategy, not least by relying on the fantasized Ukrainian scenario, contingent on the paradigm of “two Ukraines.” Rather than following divisions according to regional and linguistic affiliations as in Ukraine’s case, in the Georgian script one side is framed as pro-Western, anti-Georgian, “pink,” liberal, or “liberal fascist” in a hotchpotch of propaganda signifiers. The other side is portrayed as the pro-Georgian forces, ranging from “sovereignists” and traditionalists to supporters of geopolitical neutrality and/or reorientation towards “China” as the counterforce to the “West” or to overtly pro-Russian sympathizers. The fabrication of the 54 percent electoral result can be considered an attempt to produce the illusion of a numerical majority allegedly providing Georgian Dream with a “popular mandate.” According to various surveys, the party never had such a mandate before the elections. It was, thus, forced to campaign under the slogan “Moving Towards Europe with Peace, Dignity, and Prosperity,” knowing that, according to every poll, most Georgians across the political spectrum favored EU integration. Inflating voters’ support in this numerical manner meant legitimizing authoritarianism through a majoritarian paradigm of democracy.

Rustaveli Avenue protest, October 2024. Photo courtesy of George Shvelidze.

Beyond this numbers game, it is more interesting to look at the forms, practices, and degrees of political mobilization on the ground that these alleged “two Georgias” reveal. The ongoing mass protests in Georgia are, at their core, bodily practices of resistance, manifestations of physical presence, and movements of solidarity. Entire professions, neighborhoods, public and private sectors, migrants, and parents demonstrate astonishing self-mobilization, viscerally embodied in a decentralized resistance against an authoritarian, violent, and oligarchic government. By asserting their presence in public spaces, the bodies of protesters become instruments of collective power and action, and these spaces emerge as arenas of struggle and unity, disrupting the rhythms of everyday life. This political body starkly contrasts with the purported “majority” of those not participating or opposing the anti-government protests, among them some of the most impoverished segments of society whose destitution Georgian Dream systemically reproduces as a way to secure their loyalty. Currently, Georgian Dream’s grassroots support, with its “Anti-Maidan” resentment, exists primarily as a digital construct, a ghost public congregating in various social media groups.

Strikingly devoid of physicality, this counter-body operates mainly in virtual realms to amplify and justify state repression and violence against “extremists,” “foreign agents,” and “Satanists.” Then again, this lack of physical presence should come as no surprise given that its very political subjectivity is marked by demobilization in the face of the anti-politics of peace, with which Georgian Dream wants to blackmail the population into complete submission. This anti-politics becomes even more blatant in light of how desperately Georgian Dream awaits Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Building on the poorly substantiated hope that Trump will revert the current US policy of condemning Georgian Dream’s actions, halting the US-Georgia partnership, and imposing sanctions on Georgian officials, the “dream” is that an increasingly far-right-leaning West will ultimately accept Georgian Dream as the fascist, authoritarian rogue government it is. Ironically, after all the claims to defend the nation’s sovereignty vis-a-vis its decades-long dependence on the West, “waiting for Trump” and the magic date of January 20 has become yet another manifestation of how politics is collapsing into geopolitics. Such anti-politics disempowers its constituency and underscores the difference between Georgian Dream and the current struggle.

Standing and marching in the streets of Georgia, protesters thus wonder how the nation can unite amidst Georgian Dream’s attempts to fabricate division to the point of engineering the atmosphere of civil war. How is coexistence possible in the face of this purported polarization? What we see in the streets of Tbilisi today are political protests and profound acts of human connection. Every day, people come together in defiance of the fear of violence and repression that stalks them. They stand shoulder to shoulder, facing not only the physical violence of an increasingly repressive regime but also the mental terror of a reality they could not have anticipated. In these moments of collective resistance, one can sense the rejection of the binary logic of us-versus-them that seeks to fracture society into irreconcilable camps.

The factor of Georgia being a small country where everyone is someone’s neighbor, relative, or acquaintance seems to have started striking at Georgian Dream’s politics of division. In the face of the unspeakable violence inflicted on citizens’ bodies over the past weeks, many are appealing to those they know and cherish to feel ashamed and confront the moral implications of silence in the face of growing authoritarianism. In response, government propaganda seeks to neutralize such appeals by framing them as “bullying” or as manifestations of “liberal fascism.” This rhetoric grants Georgian Dream supporters a moral shield, allowing them to dismiss, ignore, or relativize the crackdown on democracy and the brutalization of fellow citizens. By doing so, they assert their right to “freedom of opinion,” paradoxically making them into the very liberal subjects they dismiss, condemn, or devalue. In the face of this, protesters collectively insist that no fear, hatred, or the virtual manipulation of a supposedly divided nation can be allowed to erase the bonds that hold society together. The very people that the government often caricatures as rootless “liberals” lacking patriotism or morality are at the forefront of efforts to counteract this moral relativism. They are engaged in a collective and deeply political practice of confronting, persuading, and reconnecting with their fellow citizens, refusing to let fabricated divisions define the nation. Georgia’s current protests are not only about standing against authoritarianism; they are also a struggle to repair a fractured nation and restore a shared sense of justice and solidarity.

Tamta Khalvashi’s report on the protests in Georgia last spring is available here.