Georgians Vote Against Ukrainization
Are the Country's Problems Over, or Just Beginning?
“With respect to prudence and stability, I would say that a people is more prudent, more stable, and of better judgement than a prince. It is not without reason that the voice of a people is compared with that of God, for it is obvious that popular opinion is wonderfully effective in its predictions, to the extent that it seems to be able to foresee its own good and evil fortune through some occult power.” - Machiavelli [Discourses, I.58]
Georgia’s foreign funded pantsuit mafia is at bay. Much to the chagrin of the NGO class, the ruling Georgian Dream party won an outright majority against a highly divided opposition in the Caucasian country’s Parliamentary elections held on Saturday, October 26th. The Georgian Dream government has been walking a tightrope, trying to maintain positive relations with “the West” while recognizing their perilous position next to a superpower upon whom they are reliant for trade while lacking formal diplomatic relations. Widely smeared as Russian stooges, in reality, the Georgian Dream leadership is trying to make sure the myriad of Western-funded foreign agents operating in the country under the guise of “civil society” organizations don’t turn the country into the next Ukraine and get everyone killed. Leading that faction is the French-born ceremonial President Salome Zourabichvili, who will be out of office in a month but insists this election was stolen through unprecedented fraud- while admitting she can’t prove fraud and will not try to do so. A report from the OSCE election monitoring group is being used to say the election was unfair, but if one reads the report, besides a few real problems which are present in any election, it primarily kvetches about disliking the political views of the Georgian people and that Georgia doesn’t follow arbitrary guidelines created by the OSCE and UN. The NGO class and international media insist that Georgian Dream’s claims that the country is being targeted by an international war party who want to use the country to harm Russia are a “conspiracy theory,” but this is an obvious reality that isn’t even being kept out of sight. Georgians have voted to reject the Ukrainization of their country, but will the forces of Democracy™ let them?
Throughout the post-Soviet era, Georgia has been a favored toy of the State Department blob and Western financial interests, in many ways using it as a laboratory for foreign manipulation. Examples of the harm this has caused to Georgians are countless, though the most notable is that Georgia was the site of an early “Color Revolution” [they went with “Rose” that time] which led to the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs educated American stooge President Mikheil Saakashvili taking power. A close ally of the Bush Administration, he provoked a disastrous war with Russia in 2008 leading to the Russian occupation of 20% of the country’s internationally recognized borders, a seminal event which in many ways marked the beginning post-Cold War Western anti-Russia conspiricism. In a more stunning feat of foreign interference, his government reached a deal with France where France’s Ambassador to Georgia, Salome Zourabichvili, also Columbia SIPA educated, could switch to being Georgia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs [Zourabichvili is of Georgian descent, but her family had lived in France since around 1920.] This Frenchwoman went on to be Georgia’s President. She was initially endorsed by Georgian Dream but then turned against them, and ultimately became the leading proponent of foreign interference in the country. Moreso than anything, the United States and Europe cultivated an enormous pantsuit mafia of useless, over-educated women and men who hate Russia and care for nothing but integration into the Euro-Atlantic world, or perhaps simply the paychecks they get for promoting Euro-Atlanticism.
Throughout the tribulations of the last several years, Georgian Dream has remained at least nominally committed to joining the European Union. However, Europe froze their membership bid after becoming increasingly hostile for two primary reasons. The first is the Russia-Ukraine War. While Georgia has in no way taken Russia’s side, and condemned the invasion, they have also tried to maintain peaceful relations with their most powerful neighbor and largest trade partner. Ukraine fanatics all follow the Bush doctrine of “if you’re not with us you’re against us” and hold no value above harming Russia. For example, even if Ukraine bombs your gas pipeline they will consider the sacrifice worth it to support Ukraine. Further, partially in response to their opposition to maintaining peace, Georgia has tried to reign in the NGOs. Georgian Dream, after much controversy and caution, managed to push through a “foreign agents” law which requires basic financial transparency from foreign funded organizations. In an irony that has been pointed out by many, by calling this the “Russian law” its opponents made it clear that Russia has much smaller influence operations in Georgia than the West, as otherwise it wouldn’t be the Western influence that limiting foreign influence harmed.
This is enough background to bring us to the current election and the responses to it, but if you want to learn more about Georgia’s nefarious NGO class and the struggle to reign them in, you can look back at my prior work:
The South Caucasus at a Crossroads
The lead-up to the election was tense, with a great deal of the usual “most important election of our lifetimes” rhetoric. Despite that, only 59% of Georgians voted, with Georgian Dream getting 54%, while the rest was spread between four tickets ranging from 11-7%. Though Georgia’s new electoral system does not allow coalition lists, parties have formed coalitions under the names of individual parties. Of the 4 tickets represented, only one is an individual party, whereas the other 3 represent 10 parties between them as well as other groups or politicians which are not formal political parties. In short, even the large pro-foreign influence protests did not lead to the rise of any important political leaders, and the opposition is as disunited as possible. In fact, it could be said they agree on little besides taking Western money and hating Russia, despite that they agreed to a charter. The diverse flow of Western money is perhaps their biggest problem, because it comes from the State Department blob, Soros, the EU, and really anyone involved in soft power operations, instead of a central backer. Meanwhile, Georgian Dream is primarily the project of one Georgian oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili. For all the baseless conspiracy mongering by people who consider themselves fighters of disinformation, Georgian Dream’s success may simply be a case of unity beating disunity, or in the words of Machiavelli, “This will always occur: the single person, with a bit of effort, can disunite the many and weaken the body that was so bold” [Discourses, III.11.]
It is difficult to believe this disunited opposition could have put together a functional coalition government even if they had received 55% of the vote, though they had agreed on some core issues. The Frenchwoman put together a platform to restore foreign influence known as the Georgian Charter, which one can learn about in this gushing article from the US propaganda outlet Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The most notable parts of the charter are to form a “technocratic” government with Zourabichvili in charge [she isn’t a technocrat, she is a normal politician, but she doesn’t seem the type to be bothered by details.] This government would repeal Georgian Dream’s most “authoritarian” laws such as requiring basic financial transparency from foreign funded institutions and stopping freaks and perverts from manipulating children into mutilating their genitals [otherwise known as a ban on “LGBT Propaganda” in Western media.] Further, according to commentary from “The Stockholm Institute for Eastern European Affairs,” a self-described “independent” institution, which on the same page acknowledges it is founded by the Swedish state, this “technocratic” “unity” government would then change the electoral system, presumably to something more favorable to the current opposition, and hold “real” elections under that system in a year. According to SIEEA:
“The West should voice their support to Zurabishvili’s1 initiative as it is the only realistic chance of seeing Georgia return to its European path and continue to work on the 9 steps issued by the European Commission. However, the West must also acknowledge its support risks coming at a price. The Georgian Dream government will use it an attempt to “prove” foreign—in other words, Western—involvement in Georgian internal affairs.”
This is what is always the most maddening about these people, “If we meddle in their affairs they will use that as proof we are meddling in their affairs!” This is nothing but a somewhat more benign version of “The problem with there being Nazis in Ukraine is that it gives credence to Putin’s propaganda that there are Nazis in Ukraine!”
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While the NGO employees may be poisoned by foreign funding, ideology, and a deranged hatred of Russia, it is difficult to spread their message to the broader public, especially in the absence of a unified leader on domestic policy. Legalizing homosexualist activists targeting your children is surely something the opposition-supporting public tolerates moreso than votes for, especially as gay issues have very low approval in Georgia. A broad coalition also makes a terrible voice for constitutional reform. The relative success of such a fractured opposition probably does represent fatigue with the the non-ideological “basically fine” governance of Georgian Dream, which has been in power since 2012. It is a mistake to assume that the majority of opposition supporters are interested in increasing hostilities with Russia or even sharing “European values.” It is likely that many have more practical economic concerns, much as Volodymyr Ishchenko explained about Ukraine in his book Towards the Abyss.
In short, access to the free trade zone of Europe is probably of the most interest to many pro-Europe voters, who have not been indoctrinated but instead want increased access to European markets, jobs, education, and more. At the same time, due to Georgia’s lower purchasing power compared to the EU, this is a much less appealing bargain if joining Europe comes with hostility to Russia that prevents Georgia from having access to cheaper Russian goods and acting as a transit point for trade between Europe and Russia. It is not as clear as the opposition and its international supporters would want you to believe that this election was a referendum on continuing to pursue European integration, though to an extent it does appear to judge what sacrifices people are willing to make to do so.
Meanwhile, despite fatigue with a 12 year ruling party, Georgian Dream’s “We’re gonna stop you all from getting killed” rhetoric appealed to voters. This is what the Georgian Dream party chairmen Bidzina Ivanishvili said about this at a party summit,
“Despite the promise made at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, Georgia and Ukraine were not allowed to join NATO and were left outside. All such decisions are made by the Global War Party, which has a decisive influence on NATO and the European Union and which only sees Georgia and Ukraine as cannon fodder.
They first had Georgia enter into a confrontation with Russia in 2008, and in 2014 and 2022, they put Ukraine in an even more difficult situation. The main reason for the Global War Party’s aggression towards Georgia is that it failed to turn Georgia into a second front despite great efforts, which it could have achieved very easily with the agents’ return to power.”
The truth of this statement isn’t hidden, you just need to look at what is being said about this election, which I will get to soon. The entire foreign discourse is that Georgia is too friendly to Russia and anger that Georgia cannot be used to express hostility towards Russia. 10 years ago, at the time of Maidan, it may have been possible to convince more of the public things would go a different way, but the story of what happened to Ukraine when they followed these monsters to oblivion is well known.
Regarding the NGO class, Ivanishvili said the following,
“A pseudo-elite nurtured by a foreign country has several key characteristics. They have no homeland; they do not love their country or their people because they do not really consider them to be their own. On the contrary, such people are embarrassed by their country and its people…
Such people are easy to control from the outside because they are devoid of all principles. This is the face of today’s radical opposition, and this was the face of these people when they were in power.”
Before finding this quote, I was going to say something stunningly close to this about the NGO class further down; the one thing Ivanishvili gets wrong is that a pseudo-elite nurtured by your own country is almost as bad, because they act fundamentally the same. Regardless, as someone who writes about the international war party and the menace of trans-Atlanticists with master’s degrees, in my opinion these are the two most important issues facing Georgia.
As with any election result that the cabal and its sycophants don’t like, they cannot imagine anyone holding those opinions except due to Russian influence. With that as an excuse, as usual [and as I thoroughly outlined regarding Turkiye’s election last year] the Western pro-Democracy™ forces prepared in advance to only accept the election results if they were on their side. Anatol Lieven at Responsible Statecraft notes that you don’t need to be a prophet to predict the way this was going to go, but even so, what he wrote in July is good to look back on now,
“The universal opinion among Georgians with whom I have spoken is that if the government wins, the opposition, backed by pro-Western NGOs, will allege that the results were falsified, and will launch a mass protest movement in an effort to topple the Georgian Dream government. Judging by recent statements, most Western establishments will automatically take the side of the opposition. This narrative is already well underway.”
The Atlanticist establishment indeed kept the pressure up on this narrative. On October 23, 3 days before the election, one Joshua Kucera published an essay in The New York Times titled, “This Country Turned Against the West, It’s Not Coming Back.” A mess of contradictions, the article admits that the West is openly hostile to Georgian Dream while maintaining “the thinnest veneer of impartiality” [of course, no one is fooled.] It then claims that the West appreciated Georgia’s need to stay neutral regarding Ukraine- which they most certainly did not appreciate- but speaks of an “elaborate conspiracy theory” that the party is promoting about the West wanting to use Georgia against Russia. It proceeds to say that the party is accusing media and organizations who get funding from Western powers of acting in the fashion their paymasters want them to, as if the National Endowment for Democracy is your local Rotary Club and not pushing specific agendas. It proceeds to note that, “It often feels as if pro-Western Georgians are outsourcing their political power to Europe and America rather than trying to make changes themselves.” Which is to say, yes, they are tools of foreign powers. It ends with the most relevant part: “The prospects for unrest are not small: Georgian Dream may try to steal the election, and it’s hard to imagine the opposition accepting defeat.” This is a curious sentence, and NYT has pretty careful editors, but the last part of that sentence is an independent clause. The author is saying it being hard to imagine the opposition accepting defeat is not dependent on the election being stolen. As ever, NYT is serving as foreshadowing for real life.
What he describes is of course exactly what happened. Writers of shitty op-eds across the Western world sprung to life, giving us gems such as one in The Guardian titled, “In Georgia, Russia has just scored another victory against liberal democracy.” Amusingly, this article goes as far as to say “the government chose to openly side with Moscow against Kyiv in 2022” which moves past implication or innuendo into “just making shit up” territory. What the op-eds all agree on is that if Georgia’s election wasn’t “stolen” in the conventional sense, it was at least unfair, for reasons that must vaguely have something to do with the Kremlin.
President Salome Zourabichvili, claiming to be the only independent institution in the country, is leading the election denial charge, though she is also making herself look like an idiot in the process. She doesn’t have evidence, and she won’t get evidence, but she knows in her heart the election was stolen. The one piece of evidence she does have was an exit poll by Edison Research, a US-based exit polling firm which does work for the State Department blob and which was heavily involved in claims that the last Venezuelan election was stolen.2 In an interview with Sky News, that she for some reason chose to post to Twitter, she questions how it’s possible that thousands of people could protest but they could still lose the elections. I have an answer for her: the number of street protesters only represent a tiny fraction of the votes which were counted in favor of the opposition. You can watch a choice clip of this woman here:
Laughably, in the clip above her line of reasoning is that “even the United States” was never able to prove Russian interference, so how should Georgia be be able to. Of course, the United States and Europe couldn’t prove Russian interference because it is bullshit they make up if they don’t like the election results.
Sopo Japaridze, a Georgian socialist who has been covering the election closely on Twitter, just published an article for the far-left publication Jacobin about the election generally. It provides an amusing portrait of Zourabichvili’s Odyssey, or perhaps I should say her Argonautica3, since the election results began to come in:
“The Edison poll, which favored the opposition, showed the various forces critical of the ruling Georgian Dream party total 51 percent of the vote…They declared victory, with President Salome Zourabichvili…thanking the electorate for their political maturity and “Europeanity [sic].” Yet, the pro-government poll had the ruling party at 56 percent, and the other opposition poll put it at 41-42 percent. Both camps claimed victory, though at first Western media largely reported on the opposition’s supposed lead.
As the count progressed, Georgian Dream maintained a lead of over 50 percent, and President Zourabichvili suddenly fell silent. The opposition, which had been running parallel vote counts, stopped releasing their data. One by one, opposition parties declared the election had been rigged…
Later that evening, President Zourabichvili…denounced the elections as “totally rigged,” likening their recognition to a Russian occupation, saying, “Russian elections were held.” She then retweeted a chart from an Twitter/X user attempting to prove fraud, with the caption “Cannot get any clearer,” offering no further explanation of the data…
Zourabichvili suggested that Georgia, with fewer resources than the United States, shouldn’t be expected to provide proof either. Instead, she emphasized, “What’s important is what the Georgian population feels.”…
She frequently reiterated claims of ballot-stuffing, double-voting, and election rigging without providing specifics on the scale or proof of these allegations. Having earlier reassured the public that Georgia’s first use of electronic voting was secure, she now claimed it had been used to manipulate the results.”
Bear in mind, this is the US blob’s woman in Tbilisi, after everything they said about Trump challenging the 2020 elections! Trump at least had specifics he claimed he could prove, which were thrown out for “lack of standing,” and was alleging small amounts of fraud in specific places in an election .1% would have changed. This woman has been wilding, saying things like, “We were not just witnesses but also victims of what can only be described as a Russian special operation – a new form of hybrid warfare waged against our people and our country.” Or another gem is that she claimed identity cards were stolen from welfare recipients and used in a carousel voting scheme, saying, “when one person can vote 10, 15, 17 times with the same ID” [I have to imagine there is some psychoanalyst with an obscure specialty who can tell a lot about a person by her choice of example numbers being the sequence, “10, 15, 17.”] In the same interview, she explained that whether or not Russia had anything to do with it, Georgian Dream’s electoral strategy was Russia-inspired. My personal favorite is that she was quoted in Ukrainska Pravda as saying, “I did not come to this country for that,” presumably meaning “I didn’t immigrate to Georgia from my homeland of France just to have the natives vote differently from how I want them to.”
Besides the one exit poll, the only evidence Zourabichvili seems to have is a claim by “Georgian election monitors” that that they uncovered a “large election fraud scheme.” The thing about this is that the Democracy™ industry in Georgia is completely controlled by the pantsuit mafia. No one in Georgia is paying for independent “election monitors” and it should be assumed anyone doing that “job” is working for Western governments or financial interests. Zourabichvili is now being investigated for “falsification” for her claims the election was stolen [which you can be sure the State blob considers persecution, but which they all loved when it was done to Donald Trump and his associates.] For her part, she is saying she has never heard of a case where prosecutors demand the person they are investigating provide proof, “not the other way around,” despite that in any lawsuit related to lying, such as libel or defamation [which can be criminal matters in many countries,] one does have to provide proof of one’s claims.
Zourabichvili had hoped to be the extra-constitutional leader of Georgia with her charter [an arrangement she inexplicably calls an example of “European democracy.”] Instead, she is left making a fool of herself. One imagines that she has foreign handlers who told her to run with this as far as she can and they will take care of her when it is over. It seems that the US foreign policy establishment can’t help her that much, not because they’re distracted with our elections, but because even for the Democrats and the Biden Administration there are limits to the hypocrisy you can get away with. They can make vague statements about the election being unfair, but it is too far to back her claims while calling Trump a Nazi would-be dictator for having questioned election results in the past and intending to do so again if he does that this US election. It is objectively the case that Zourabichvili’s claims are at least equally baseless to the worst things Trump has said in this regard. What’s more, you can be sure she hopes her supporters storm their Parliament. She called for protests, some of which were big, but they seem to have calmed down pretty rapidly. Not only have Georgians seen war in their lifetimes, but unlike Ukrainians in 2014, they have seen what happened to Ukraine.
While Zourabichvili has been all over the place, the OSCE monitoring group from the EU does have uniform standards and criticized the election. This is widely cited in the media, but the OSCE did not say the election is invalid. It is worth going over at some length, because reports like this mislead people who do not understand them. The first thing you need to know is that the OSCE would have released the exact same report if the opposition won and Georgian Dream got 40%. The average person thinks of an election being stolen as not allowing people to vote or not counting the vote fairly on a large scale, or perhaps simply making up a number. An organization like the OSCE judges a lot more than that. It is informative to look at what Jimmy Carter said about the 1997 election in Liberia:
“The election process has been free and transparent. I can't say that it's been completely fair, and neither are the elections fair in my country, where if you don't have $50 million to spend, your voice will never be heard, through television or radio, by the people of America. So you can't say that it's completely fair unless all 13 candidates have the same amount of money, the same number of vehicles, the same amount of access to news media, and that has not been the case. But I think as far as this election representing the freely expressed will of the Liberian people, I would say yes, it has been a free election.”
It’s obviously going to be the case that Georgian Dream has more resources and a better ability to use them than 10 small opposition parties. The great majority of the report is explaining why it is not fair in the way Carter describes, but it was free in the sense a normal person thinks of. Further, much of what is in the OSCE preliminary report is just them explaining that they don’t like the opinions of the Georgian people, “divisive rhetoric” generally, or want them to follow arbitrary guidelines that are in no way the objectively correct form of government or voting. Let’s look at some examples:
“Contestants could generally campaign freely while campaign rhetoric and imagery was highly divisive. Reports of pressure on voters, particularly on public sector employees, remained widespread in the campaign.”
The issue of how to handle Georgia’s geopolitical situation is difficult and divisive, so that criticism is largely meaningless. “Pressure on public sector workers” is one you always hear, and it doesn’t necessarily mean more than your boss telling you to vote for the people in power who are currently buttering your bread. This sounds disturbing to Americans who are used to a professional bureaucracy and more importantly are ridiculously naive about how their own government works, but, if true, that is nothing uncommon, though undesirable. I can assure you that posting a picture on Facebook of yourself in a MAGA hat is a rapid way to dead-end your career in many American government offices.
The OSCE was also upset that electoral changes ended the law mandating equal representation for women on party lists, which is anti-freedom in general. It is no surprise that this EU group demands affirmative action elections. The report includes the following:
“Women involved in politics continue to face entrenched stereotypes, challenges within political parties and various forms of violence. Party programmes largely lacked messages specifically targeting women and did not feature women in their campaigns.”
“Various forms of violence” is bad, whatever that means, but the rest of this is just complaining about the electorate and the candidates. Neither of those things are “anti-democratic” or a sign of anything wrong with the elections, just criticisms of the Georgian people themselves, and an admission that they don’t actually want the election to lead to a government which reflects public sentiment. Another complaint was a requirement to be a resident for 10 years before standing for office, which is a reasonable regulation, especially in countries that have a large diaspora, and in this instance, where a foreign-born President seems set on undermining the entire system.
The true kicker is this though: “Contrary to international standards, and despite previous ODIHR recommendations, citizens declared legally incapacitated by a court decision and placed in institutional care are disenfranchised.” Yes, you read that correctly. No, that is not a joke. They are upset that Georgia does not let people who are so retarded or demented that a court has mandated they be institutionalized vote in their elections. According to a footnote, this is the UN standard:
“Articles 12 and 29 of the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) oblige states to “recognize that persons with disabilities enjoy legal capacity on an equal basis with others”. See also the CRPD Committee’s General Comment no. 1 “person’s decision-making ability cannot be a justification for any exclusion of persons with disabilities from exercising their political rights, including the right to vote [and] the right to stand for election””
It is apparently the official position of the UN that you cannot use people being unable to make their own decisions as reason to not allow them to vote. It somehow explains a lot about the world that the UN demands the severely retarded be allowed to hold public office. I’ve long said Joe Biden probably shouldn’t have his own power of attorney, but according to the UN even if he didn’t that should not be used to stop him from standing for office. In my state one has the option to have two witnesses sign the ballot of an incapacitated person, but I imagined physical disabilities that stop a man from signing his name. I suppose it also applies to someone in a coma or a severe non-verbal autist. Well, I guess you don’t have to be retarded to vote for the Georgian opposition, but it probably helps.
This perhaps puts such election reports into context, but it begs the question, why are they like this? The thing you need to understand about this organization and these rules is that they want countries to enter the “End of History” Europe. From there, they do not want a passionate contest of ideas that challenges who holds power in a society, but instead for elections to be two guys- or better yet, women- politely discussing the value added tax on men’s purses or what percentage of the public pension fund should be invested in “green” industries. The real power will be with bureaucrats who serve financial interests while the public languishes. That is the system. Elections within the EU are meant to be a vestigial ceremony that have little impact on the direction of the country and certainly don’t ever threaten the Euro-Atlantic power structures. The Mandarins view elections like a ritual conducted by priests to pray that the year experiences credit liquidity.
The report does list some real problems, the voting process being assessed negatively in 6% out of the 1,924 booths observed, which they call a “significantly high number.” In some instances, Georgian Dream had people recording the polling station, which is not illegal, but which they claim has an intimidating effect [perhaps if you’re a European woman.] In other instances they didn’t like how the stations were organized, or heard reports of vote buying or people being “tracked” by unknown parties outside of polling stations [one wonders if those were just other exit pollsters.] Nothing described could possibly have made the difference in an election with this much of a disparity between the parties. The most notorious instance was when one individual was recorded stuffing a ballot box, but it was so egregious it appears staged. It needs to be remembered, as explained above, this NGO class are beasts of no nation, they believe in nothing and will do anything as long as it doesn’t involve the risk of severe personal bodily harm. The implication of any such accusations is meant to be that since the opposition parties and NGO employees are “democracy activists” any bad behavior must be Georgian Dream, the “increasingly authoritarian” ruling party, but responsibility is yet to be proven. There were instances of fights at polling stations which spread across social media, but that can happen when you get any large group of people together: those could be completely unrelated to voting besides happening to get people in the same room at the same time.
People can go on all day about such things if they want, but elections are one of the largest feats of human organization in any country, and there will inevitably be problems. For example, I live in America which is theoretically the most mature democracy in the world. My state has mail-only voting. The small town next to me just didn’t have over half of its ballots delivered to voters, with the election getting close, and there is currently no solution but to hope they show up [the postal service does not have them] or to know to request a new one. There is no chance this doesn’t greatly lower participation, and that town persistently votes one way by a large margin. Across the state someone torched a ballot drop box. These episodes, one of which appears to be incompetence and the other of which appears to be some sort of black bloc anarchist, are worse than anything described in the Georgian elections. The media is properly covering them as important news stories, but no head of state is going to deny the election over this. There are things to investigate about the Georgian election, but this report simply does not describe a stolen election. Instead, it says “The election administration managed technical aspects of the elections efficiently and transparently,” which is what people who don’t have master’s degrees in social sciences imagine “free election” means.
Some people in the media have been circumspect in dealing with this situation, recognizing the lack of evidence. For example, here is what Al Jazeera posted to Twitter:
It acknowledges Georgian Dream’s victory, though within the article there are a lot of details about the accusations of wrongdoing. Even US Secretary of State Antony Blinken seemed to acknowledge the election results amidst the US and European governments refusing to officially acknowledge them:
Other people have been much less restrained, and I would be remiss if I didn’t include at least one deranged take from the internet, because Ukraine’s staunchest supporters have not been shy about demanding Georgia be a second front:
There was also some commentary from the John McCain Institute, which I am sure has the best interests of the Georgians at heart:
What would John McCain do if a vote doesn’t reflect the will of the people? Clearly, Georgia needs some “freedom,” perhaps even “boots on the ground.”
More representative of elite opinion is an article from Foreign Policy titled, “The U.S. Should Not Recognize Georgia’s Illegitimate Elections.” It is written by Ian Kelly, the US Ambassador to Georgia from 2015-2018 and David J. Kramer, who is described as “executive director of the George W. Bush Institute.” That would be the very same George W. Bush whose administration seems to have tempted Georgia under the prior regime into provoking Russia into a short war that Georgia badly lost. The article starts by directly praising US involvement in Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution” of 2004. It calls for sanctions against Georgians including the Prime Minister and the election committee. According to the authors, Ivanishvili “made the absurd claim that the opposition was in thrall to its Western “patrons,” who had ordered them to ensure Georgia opened a “second front” against Russia.” Once again that is completely true, whether or not they have phrased it that directly, Georgian Dream is being attacked by the West for not being hostile to Russia and the opposition and their supporters are paid by the West to pursue that policy. It ends with this quote,
“The Georgian people, who remain very pro-West and are eager to join NATO and the EU, deserve no less—just like those struggling for freedom and human rights around the world. Georgia has become the latest battleground, and it’s time for the United States to rise to the challenge.”
Right, it’s absurd to say that they are trying to open a second front, but also it’s already a battleground between the NATO and Russia.
Alternately, one European man is willing to recognize Georgia’s elections, the great Magyar hope, Viktor Orban:
Much to the chagrin of the leading Eurocrats, the EU’s current President went to Georgia to offer them congratulations on avoiding becoming the next Ukraine.
As it stands, it doesn’t appear that the Western powers have it in them to color revolution Georgia at this time. However, the opposition are currently claiming they will refuse to be seated in the Parliament and will thus deny Georgia Dream quorum. This of course will cause a constitutional crisis. At the same time, it is hard to keep four diverse opposition groups together and as has happened in the past, one will probably be brought into the fold. Such obstruction is also profoundly unpopular among the general public of any country and likely to make the boycotters the ones who bleed support in a standoff. Still, it gives them many occasions to get people into the streets, leading to potential confrontations and escalation. It is also the case that Zourabichvili, who is out of office in around a month, is being rapidly discredited, and another opposition leader may arise. Though Georgian Dream’s election was decisive, it seems the country’s future is less certain than ever.
Georgia is one of the oldest civilizations in the world, having existed in its currently identifiable form for at least around 3,000 years. It has always been difficult to survive in the Caucasus, which is at the crossroads of Empires. It is understandable why after millennia of negotiating the Persians, the Romans, the Turks, the Russians, and everyone else, that they might look to Europe as a savior. There is no evidence that Russia currently wishes to harm Georgia, but the power disparity and proximity of the two nations means that Georgia must tread carefully to maintain its independence from Russia while not antagonizing a neighbor that could rapidly overwhelm and consume it. The “Euro-Atlantic’s” unremitting hostility to Russia and demands that Georgia join in a sanctions regime mean that joining up with Europe as things stand will only bring danger and poverty, not safety and wealth. Fortunately, it seems like the Georgian people are much wiser than the Ukrainians and have had a chance to learn from history and world events. They are not keen to repeat Ukraine’s mistakes. Instead, Georgia should continue cultivating the conditions to enter the European Union on their own terms at a future date instead of following those who want to lead them towards Ukrainization and hell.
Contrary to all the smears, Georgian Dream is not a “pro-Russia” party, it is a pro-Georgia party that is trying to stop them all from getting killed. The question is how much longer Western financial interests, the State Department blob, and their own foreign funded pantsuit mafia will let them. For now, at least, it appears the nation’s sensible people may win and Georgia may survive.
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Zourabichvili transliterates her name into French because she is French. The alternate spelling is English. I have used the French besides in quotations.
It is plausible that the Venezuelan election was stolen, but I’m not going to trust information about that from anyone who contracts for Voice of America.
That is a real groaner, but an irresistible joke being as Georgia is the land whence Jason got the Golden Fleece.
Thanks for the lengthy explainer. It’s not easy to piece together what is actually happen in these countries. As you mentioned it’s striking that the Western media feels no compunction in flat out lying and producing propaganda these days, and no need to fairly present the views of the other side.
Also as you mentioned, the West now has a record of visiting its proxies with disaster in the former USSR. You could have also mentioned Armenia as an example where they went over to Soros and the West delivered military defeat. The West just doesn’t deliver.
It would be nice if the Western foreign policy elite learned something now and then and sometimes just respected a country like Georgia’s neutrality and independence, but they’re just relentless.