A few Fridays ago, some of us were at a Tbilisi restaurant on the fourth anniversary of Georgia's "rose revolution." When the fireworks started, we crowded into the restaurant's small back room to watch. Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, the man who had ushered in the revolution, would be stepping down that Monday, after brutally dispersing a peaceful demonstration and closing down the main independent news station in town. One of the women looked at her friend with a smirk. "So this is where our money went," she said.
We smirked along, then wondered: how did it go so wrong? When Saakashvili was elected president in 2004, he had established himself as the darling of the west and transformed a corrupt and dilapidated country. He'd quintupled the budget; paved the roads; reformed the police service; and attracted unprecedented levels of foreign investment. Yet social policy had lagged behind, and the independence of the press and judiciary had been threatened. Georgians from all socioeconomic sectors had accumulated a personal litany of complaints.
The protests began this November. November 7th began much like the five days that preceded it, when tens of thousands of demonstrators massed in front of parliament in Tbilisi. Though the ostensible catalyst for the protest was the arrest of a former defence minister-turned-opposition leader, the deeper explanation was that people felt Saakashvili held them in contempt. Even so, they seemed unsure exactly why they were there and surprised when I asked. Their responses were filtered though a general and inchoate sense of gloom: the jails were filled with teenagers; prices had doubled but pensions had not; the government had sold off their best assets in sloppy privatisation campaigns.
The riot police arrived in Tbilisi's central square, hitting demonstrators and bystanders with tear gas, truncheons, rubber bullets and acoustic weapons. Thousands marched down to the riverbank instead. Within the hour, the police had returned, trapping the demonstrators between two bridges. By evening, the government had first raided, then suspended, Imedi, the television station that had become the voice of the opposition, accusing it of inciting a coup.
Despite the shock of the police's behaviour during the demonstration, it was the less visible closure of Imedi that many Georgians found most ominous; by then, the situation had become so tense that war or revolution seemed possible. In the Caucasus, where concession is seen as weakness, Saakashvili ended the brinkmanship with ballots rather than blood: the next day, he announced his resignation and new presidential elections on 5th January, ten months before schedule.
Now we are in the middle of campaign season, and already it looks like a wash. The decision to call the elections in January—with barely enough time to run a campaign, and during the biggest holiday of the year—seems designed with an easy win for Saakashvili in mind. The main opposition, so rousing in the role of underdog, are much wobblier as candidates. Faced with a charismatic opponent in the form of Saakashvili, they are promising a European style of parliament if they win—a platform likely too abstract to be effectual. Already there are numerous reports of the government misappropriating administrative funds and using intimidation tactics to ensure votes. Meanwhile, Saakashvili has refashioned himself as a populist: kissing babies and raising pensions in television broadcasts that are half infomercial, half fireside chat.
Nevertheless, this will be the most fascinating election in Georgia's history. Saakashvili, elected in 2004 with 97 per cent of the vote, will probably only squeak by with the 50 per cent he needs if he wins now. Ironically, it is his former supporters in the intelligentsia and elite who most dislike him now. A top Georgian lawyer told me that 24 out of 26 people in his firm said they would not vote for Saakashvili. "If there was a free judiciary and a free press, I'd gladly vote for him," he said to me. "But I'd rather be back in previous times, without gas and electricity, than live in Belarus."
Georgians are famous for a theatrical bent, as much in politics as in life. Yet for the first time, Georgians are genuinely scared of the government. The first few days after the demonstration were full of dark comedy, but everyone has since gone quiet. Important people are sure that their phones and houses are bugged. Businessmen refuse to support the opposition for fear of getting audited in response. Recently I needed a throwaway quote for a photo caption, and was repeatedly turned down. My question: "What does democracy mean to you?"
But this is not the sea change it has seemed in the west. There had been earlier hints of the government's authoritarian streak. Other television stations critical of the government had found their way off the air, or into the hands of new buyers. Political arrests had become harsher and more regular. New legislation had given unprecedented power to the executive—and created a rubber-stamp parliament—with the logic that these were the required vicissitudes of a consolidating state.
It's easy being a democrat when you're popular. Saakashvili let the opposition do what it wanted only when it was weak, and the media go uncensored when it didn't criticise him. Bolstered by a sense of right and feeling of persecution, Saakashvili has taken on a tinge of self-fulfilling paranoia. Critics have been labelled traitors and opposition members tried for treason. One analyst, comparing Saakashvili to his predecessor, said that while before there was democracy without democrats, now there are democrats without democracy.
All of which is why the current crisis may actually be the best thing that could have happened. The endless encomia from the west have not done Georgia any favours, and Georgia will give up the arrangement by which it pretends to have democracy while the west pretends to see it. Georgians, so used to voting for heroes, will for the first time be voting the way we do in the west: with their fingers holding their noses.
