Georgia’s capital Tbilisi is gearing up for the decisive elections on 26 October amid risks that may put the nail in the coffin of the nation’s democratic and Euro-Atlantic future, given the ruling party’s increasingly authoritarian tendencies combined with a pro-Russian turn.
The Georgian Dream, the ruling party led by oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, is starting the campaign with a halted EU accession process, sanctions, frozen Western support, and closer ties with Russia and China, while leveraging conspiracies, disinformation campaigns, repression, and fear.
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Global War Party narrative
The ‘Global War Party’ narrative first resurfaced at the beginning of 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mamuka Mdinaradze, the parliamentary leader of the ruling Georgian Dream party, has been one of the most vocal speakers along with Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, consistently linking the critics of Georgia’s reaction to the war to the “war party”.
Mdinaradze first attributed this title to the ruling party’s biggest opponent, the United National Movement (UNM), which is led by former president Mikheil Saakashvili and was previously in power.
Since Georgian Dream tends to link its critics to the UNM to discredit them, the “war party” became a synonym of a “collective UNM”, which allowed government propaganda the flexibility to insert undesired powers and individuals under the same warmongering umbrella.
This pool of persons and powers under this framework has extended to all Georgian opposition parties, even EU and EU officials, as well as Georgian civil society groups.
Granted, I know next to nothing about Georgian politics, but to me it’s crazy how they requested to join the EU not so long ago and now they pull this shit. 🤷