Georgia’s Domestic Politics: Historical Legacies, Class Dynamics and Geopolitical Contestation

Abstract

This article examines Georgia’s political trajectory from independence in 1991 to the authoritarian consolidation under way in 2026. It argues that the current crisis is not an anomaly but the culmination of unresolved tensions inherited from the post-Soviet transition: a weak state built on informal networks of power, a party system organized around personalities rather than programs, a socioeconomic order that concentrates wealth while leaving the majority in precarity, and a geopolitical position that makes the country a permanent object of great-power competition. The analysis proceeds in seven steps. It reconstructs the historical sequence of state collapse, authoritarian modernization and managed democracy; maps the contemporary party landscape and its funding conflicts; assesses the institutional weakness of Georgian parties; documents the legal and political architecture of the current repressive offensive; analyzes the class structure that underpins elite capture; examines Georgia’s drift between Brussels and Moscow; and concludes with an assessment of the durability and limits of the emerging regime.

Keywords: Georgia, Georgian Dream, democratic backsliding, party institutionalization, clientelism, oligarchy, European integration, Russia, South Caucasus.

1. Introduction

Georgia presents a paradox in the post-Soviet space: a country that was once a democratic beacon for the region is now drifting toward authoritarian consolidation, caught between its constitutional commitment to Euro-Atlantic integration and its government’s increasingly rapid turn toward Moscow. In the span of two decades, the country moved from the 2003 Rose Revolution, celebrated as a model of peaceful democratic breakthrough, to the first electoral transfer of power in its modern history in 2012, and from there to a situation in which the ruling party is asking the Constitutional Court to outlaw the country’s five main opposition parties. On 21 October 2026, the Court opened hearings on that petition in Batumi, in a process that civil society organizations describe as the threshold of one-party rule (Reuters, 2026a; Civil Georgia, 2026a).

Understanding this trajectory requires an analysis that goes beyond superficial political commentary and examines the deep historical structures, class configurations and geopolitical pressures that have shaped Georgia’s political development since independence in 1991. Explanations focused exclusively on the personality of Bidzina Ivanishvili, on Russian interference or on the failures of Western policy each capture part of the picture, but none explains why the same patterns of personalized power, weak institutions and polarized competition have reappeared under every government since independence.

This article argues that Georgia’s current political crisis is not an anomaly but the culmination of unresolved tensions inherited from the post-Soviet transition: a weak state built on informal networks of power, a socioeconomic order that concentrates wealth while leaving the majority in precarity and a geopolitical position that makes the country a permanent object of great-power competition. These three structural conditions interact. Informal networks occupy the space left by weak institutions; socioeconomic precarity makes voters dependent on patrons and on the state; and geopolitical contestation supplies both the resources and the narratives with which rival elites mobilize support and delegitimize their opponents.

The article is organized as follows. Section 2 reconstructs the historical background, from state collapse to managed democracy. Section 3 maps the political landscape, the conflict over party funding and the conspiratorial narrative of the “Global War Party.” Section 4 examines whether Georgia has “real” parties and concludes that its party system is weakly institutionalized, personalized and structured by patronage. Section 5 documents the current crisis of democratic backsliding and one-party consolidation. Section 6 analyzes the socioeconomic and class dimensions of elite capture. Section 7 addresses Georgia’s geopolitical positioning between Brussels and Moscow, including the role of the Georgian Orthodox Church. Section 8 presents the conclusions.

2. Historical Background: From State Collapse to Managed Democracy

2.1 Independence, Civil War and State Collapse (1991–1995)

Georgia’s post-Soviet trajectory has been characterized by recurring cycles of political upheaval and partial consolidation. After declaring independence from the Soviet Union on 9 April 1991, the country went through a difficult transition to democracy. The first multiparty legislative elections, held in October 1990, had been won by the Round Table–Free Georgia coalition, led by the dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who was elected president by popular vote in May 1991. Gamsakhurdia’s overthrow in a bloody coup at the end of 1991, the so-called Tbilisi War of December 1991 to January 1992, plunged the country into a civil war that would last almost until 1995 (BBC News, 2026; Uppsala Conflict Data Program, n.d.).

During this period, Georgia suffered state collapse and civil war, with public order in jeopardy and high levels of street crime and violence. Armed formations such as the Mkhedrioni and the National Guard, which had taken part in the coup, operated as semi-autonomous centers of power engaged in extortion, smuggling and illegal checkpoints, blurring the boundary between the state, political factions and organized crime (Uppsala Conflict Data Program, n.d.). The grievances of ethnic minorities in the early years of independence, sharpened by the proclamation of Georgian as the sole official language and by the nationalist rhetoric of the time, strengthened the separatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, leading to the Georgian Civil War (1991–1993) and to wars of secession that left both regions outside Tbilisi’s control.

This founding experience left three lasting legacies. First, the state that emerged in the mid-1990s was a coalition of armed groups, former Soviet officials and regional strongmen rather than an impersonal bureaucracy. Second, the territorial conflicts gave Russia a permanent instrument of leverage, as Moscow became both patron of the separatist regions and arbiter of any settlement. Third, the experience of chaos produced a lasting social preference for order and strong leadership, a preference that every subsequent government has invoked.

2.2 The Shevardnadze Years: Weak State and Managed Pluralism (1995–2003)

The return of Eduard Shevardnadze, the former Soviet foreign minister, stabilized the country without transforming it. Under his presidency, Georgia adopted a new constitution in 1995, held regular elections and tolerated a relatively free press and an active non-governmental sector. Yet the state remained weak, corruption pervaded the public administration, and electricity shortages, unpaid pensions and the shadow economy defined everyday life. By the end of the period, the Georgian state was on the verge of dissolution, with illegal armed groups, separatist movements and several territorial units, notably Adjara under Aslan Abashidze, outside the effective control of the central government (BBC News, 2026).

The Shevardnadze era also established the pattern of party politics that persists to this day. The ruling Citizens’ Union of Georgia functioned less as a programmatic party than as a vehicle for the president and the networks around him, and it disintegrated as soon as its leader’s authority weakened (Melikidze, 2022). Pluralism existed, but it was a managed pluralism, in which competition took place among personalized factions of a narrow elite rather than among organized social interests.

2.3 The Rose Revolution and Authoritarian Modernization (2003–2012)

The 2003 Rose Revolution marked a decisive turning point. Triggered by rigged parliamentary elections in November 2003, the revolution is widely recognized as a peaceful uprising that ended Soviet-style rule and brought Mikheil Saakashvili to the head of government (Rescheto and Pahlke, 2023). It brought a young, Western-educated administration to power and raised hopes of democratic consolidation. Saakashvili pushed through numerous reforms, and his legacy as a modernizer was significant in areas such as policing, the fight against petty corruption and administrative modernization. The restructuring of the traffic police, the simplification of licensing and taxation, and the reduction of bribery in everyday public services transformed citizens’ relationship with the state.

However, behind a gleaming, pro-Western façade lay an attempt at authoritarian modernization, and the neoliberal, even ultraliberal, ideological legacy, with its mantra of the “small state” and the fiscal constraints that accompanied it, hindered an active modernization policy and meant that social transformation largely failed to materialize (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2025). The reform team around Kakha Bendukidze openly borrowed libertarian models. In 2006, the government drastically reduced labor protections in the Labor Code and abolished the Labor Inspectorate; the new code eliminated provisions on weekly rest, limits on overtime and breaks, allowed verbal contracts and made it possible to dismiss workers without notice and for any reason (Human Rights Watch, 2019). Growth returned, but its benefits were concentrated in a narrow stratum, and the social question was subordinated to the priorities of investment and deregulation.

Politically, the reform era concentrated power in the presidency and a small inner circle. The violent dispersal of protests in November 2007, pressure on independent television and the abuse of detainees in the prison system, which became a decisive electoral issue in 2012, revealed the coercive underside of the modernizing project. The August 2008 war with Russia, which ended with Moscow’s recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, further entrenched the securitized framing of politics and the identification of the ruling party with the Western camp.

2.4 The 2012 Transfer of Power and the Consolidation of Georgian Dream (2012–2024)

The 2012 parliamentary elections marked another significant democratic shift, as the country experienced its first peaceful transfer of power through the ballot box. The Georgian Dream coalition, founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, defeated Saakashvili’s United National Movement. Ivanishvili had made his fortune in metals and banking in Russia during the 1990s before returning to Georgia (Forbes, 2026). Georgian Dream had won the 2012 elections on the promise of a morally superior politics and, for a long time, it kept that promise: the police and the judiciary acted less repressively.

Over time, however, the ruling party consolidated its control over all branches of the state, leading to political polarization and a state crisis. Ivanishvili formally stepped down as prime minister in 2013 but continued to wield informal power; he returned as party chairman in 2018 and as honorary chairman in 2023. As the Bertelsmann Transformation Index notes, the real center of power lay “not with the prime minister, but behind the scenes with Ivanishvili,” who “wields the main veto power in Georgia” (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026). The attempt to pass a “foreign agents” law in 2023, withdrawn after mass protests, its adoption in 2024 as the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence and the passage of the Law on Family Values and Protection of Minors in September 2024 marked the transition from a hegemonic party within a competitive system to a party seeking to close that system (European External Action Service, 2026; Reuters, 2024b).

2.5 Analytical Assessment

The historical record reveals a recurring cycle rather than a linear process of democratization. Each new government came to power promising to break with its predecessor, each initially opened up political space and each then concentrated power around a leader and his network. The constant throughout the cycle is the weakness of impersonal institutions and the strength of informal networks. Georgian Dream’s authoritarian turn is therefore best understood not as a deviation from an otherwise democratic trajectory, but as the most advanced expression of a structural pattern inherited from the 1990s.

3. The Political Landscape

Georgia’s political landscape is deeply fragmented and goes to the heart of its current crisis. Although the simple dichotomy between “pro-Western” and “pro-Russian” captures the broad geopolitical poles, the reality is more complex: a ruling party that has adopted a “sovereigntist” stance, a diverse pro-Western opposition dependent on external support, and a powerful “globalist” conspiracy narrative that the government uses to discredit its rivals.

3.1 Mapping the Political Spectrum

The following table classifies the main political actors according to their declared foreign policy orientations, based on monitoring reports and political analyses.

Table 1. Georgia’s main political actors by foreign policy orientation

Political actor	Orientation	Key foreign policy stance	International ties and funding
Georgian Dream (GD) (ruling party)	Sovereigntist / anti-Western	Formally supports EU and NATO membership but in practice prioritizes “peace” and normalization with Russia; has suspended EU accession and avoids criticizing the Kremlin.	Founded and funded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who made his fortune in Russia and allegedly maintains extensive Kremlin networks; sanctioned by the United States in December 2024 (Office of Foreign Assets Control, 2024).
People’s Power (GD satellite)	Pro-Russian	Explicitly advocates amending the constitution to abandon the goals of Euro-Atlantic integration and calls for a plebiscite on EU membership.	Funded by donors from Ivanishvili’s inner circle, including executives of his companies.
Alt-Info / Conservative Movement	Pro-Kremlin	Advocates a military alliance with Russia and the replacement of liberalism with a Christian-conservative ideology.	Close ideological ties to the Russian Eurasianist Aleksandr Dugin. Financially dependent on donations from its co-owner and sponsors, but has faced financial difficulties.
Alliance of Patriots of Georgia (APG)	Pro-Kremlin	“Moderately Euroskeptic” party advocating neutrality and direct dialogue with Russia, while questioning the cost of EU and NATO integration.	Investigative reports claim it sought and received millions of US dollars from the Kremlin to fund its campaigns (Coda Story, 2020; IDFI, 2020).
Solidarity for Peace	Pro-Kremlin	Proposes signing a new “Treaty of Georgievsk” with Russia, a historical reference to the 1783 pact that led to Russian protectorate status.	Reported to have close ties to the Kremlin.
United National Movement (UNM)	Pro-Western	Main opposition force; strongly advocates Euro-Atlantic integration and presents itself as the main alternative to GD.	Associate member of the European People’s Party (EPP). Relies heavily on European party networks for visibility and legitimacy.
European Georgia	Pro-Western	Liberal party that split from the UNM and maintains a clear pro-European orientation.	Observer member of the EPP. Its media arm, Tabula, has been accused by the government of being funded from Finland’s state budget.
Lelo for Georgia / Strong Georgia	Pro-Western	Liberal party founded by businessmen, focused on economic development and Euro-Atlantic integration.	Dependent on the financial capacity of its founders, Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze. The government accuses it of being funded by external “sponsors” and of using the Pirveli channel for political purposes with NED support.
Girchi	Pro-Western	Libertarian party that split from the UNM, known for its unconventional campaigns and its emphasis on individual freedom.	Claims to be funded solely by its members and projects, not by foreign donors. The government maintains that its funding is not fully declared.
Droa	Pro-Western	Liberal party founded by Elene Khoshtaria, an outspoken critic of the government.	The government has specifically accused the European Endowment for Democracy (EED) of funding Droa from the EU budget through “alternative schemes.”
For Georgia	Pro-Western / centrist	Founded in 2024 by former GD Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia; the only opposition force that took up its seats in parliament.	Added to the constitutional petition to ban opposition parties in September 2026 (Civil Georgia, 2026a).

Source: Author’s elaboration based on the monitoring reports and political analyses cited in the text.

The table shows that the formal ideological labels of Georgian parties are less informative than their foreign policy positioning and their funding channels. Foreign policy has become the main cleavage through which domestic competition is organized, and the question of who pays for politics has become the main weapon in that competition.

3.2 The Battlefield of Political Finance

A central theme of Georgian political conflict is the financing of political parties. The ruling Georgian Dream party has made it a priority to cut off what it describes as the “foreign funding” of its opponents.

Georgian Dream’s offensive. The government has passed laws tightening control over foreign grants and the activities of non-governmental organizations, presenting them as instruments of foreign interference. The Foreign Agents Registration Act, adopted on 1 April 2025, was followed by amendments to the Law on Grants and related legislation adopted on 4 March 2026, which define grants so broadly that they may include technical assistance, expertise and any funds that “may potentially” be used to influence state authorities or any sector of society, require prior government consent and attach criminal penalties to violations (Parliament of Georgia, 2025; International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, 2026; FIDH, 2026). The speaker of parliament accused the opposition of using “fictitious transfers, front persons and alternative channels” to funnel money from “foreign intelligence services.” The Anti-Corruption Bureau has repeatedly claimed that the main opposition parties, including the UNM, Lelo, Girchi and European Georgia, do not fully declare their funding, insinuating that it comes from foreign donors through affiliated NGOs.

The opposition’s dependence. For their part, opposition parties are often excluded from national media and policymaking, which leads them to rely on European party networks and donor assistance for resources and legitimacy. This support, however, has been criticized for shifting their accountability from domestic voters toward international donors, which can hollow out their ties to the grassroots. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index observes that after 1991 “it was donor-dependent NGOs, not grassroots groups, that came to civil society,” and that groups emerging from below have struggled to bridge the gap between the political elite and the wider public (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026).

The resource asymmetry is stark. In 2025, Georgian Dream received GEL 18.05 million in donations, 67% of all donations to political parties, and 68% of the GEL 8.9 million allocated from the state budget to six parties (European Platform for Democratic Elections, 2026). The funding conflict is therefore not a contest between equals: the ruling party combines privileged access to domestic private money and public funding with legal instruments designed to criminalize the external resources on which its rivals depend.

3.3 The “Global War Party” Narrative

In the Georgian context, the term “globalists” is not a self-designation but a powerful conspiracy theory promoted by the ruling party and its allies. Georgian Dream and People’s Power frequently invoke the “Global War Party” to explain political opposition.

What it means. The narrative holds that a shadowy liberal-globalist cabal controls the EU, NATO and Western governments and seeks to drag Georgia into a war with Russia in order to weaken Moscow. It accuses the opposition and civil society of being puppets of that “party.” Georgian Dream has never identified its alleged members; Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has claimed that naming them could harm national security (Silver, 2026).

Its genealogy. The narrative has antecedents in the “hidden hand” rhetoric that Ivanishvili has long cultivated. In 2011 he distinguished between genuine opposition figures and a “pseudo-opposition” secretly serving the government; in 2019 he praised the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute as “great institutions” while accusing their Georgian contractors of manipulating polls. In 2024, these claims merged into a “super-conspiracy” in which Saakashvili and the UNM appear as subordinate actors directed by foreign “masters” (Silver, 2026). Various observers have described it as a Georgian variant of what Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in politics, now central to the ruling party’s official discourse and foreign policy (Chkhetiani, 2025).

Its political function. The narrative serves a dual purpose: it delegitimizes the domestic opposition by branding it a foreign agent, and it justifies the government’s estrangement from the West as a defense of national sovereignty and peace. It also serves a third, subtler function. By attributing unwanted Western policies to hostile agents embedded in Western institutions, Georgian Dream can proclaim its loyalty to a “true” West while attacking a supposedly corrupted one, preserving the rhetorical commitment to EU membership demanded by public opinion while hollowing out its substance (Silver, 2026; EDMO, 2025).

3.4 Analytical Assessment

In sum, Georgia’s party system is polarized around a fundamental geopolitical cleavage. The ruling Georgian Dream party has evolved from a nominally pro-Western party into a sovereigntist, anti-Western force that exploits its founder’s Russian ties and a powerful “Global War Party” conspiracy narrative to stay in power. The pro-Western opposition is fragmented but united in its goal of Euro-Atlantic integration, although it depends heavily on European party networks and foreign funding, which the government uses to discredit it. The small pro-Kremlin parties act as ideological allies of the government, advocate a more explicitly pro-Russian orientation and allow Georgian Dream to present itself as a moderate center between two extremes. The geopolitical cleavage, however, overlays a deeper structural problem: parties on both sides lack the institutional features of genuine parties, as the following section shows.

4. Parties without Institutions: Personality, Patronage and Polarization

Georgia has formal political parties, but they function overwhelmingly as personality-based groupings. A more precise formulation would be that Georgia has parties as legal entities, but they lack the institutional depth, programmatic coherence and social rootedness that would make them “real” parties in the classical sense. Evidence from both the academic literature and current political practice consistently points in the same direction: Georgia’s party system is weakly institutionalized, highly personalized and structured around informal patronage networks rather than durable ideological or social cleavages.

4.1 The Structural Weakness of Party Institutionalization

The scholarly consensus is unequivocal. Georgian political parties are “weakly institutionalized and highly dependent on personalities and particular leaders,” with “a lot of populism, little programmatic content, no internal democracy, financial dependence on the state and a low level of organizational loyalty among members” (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2020). The system is characterized as “an unstable electoral democracy with weakly institutionalized parties, in which the political playing field strongly favors the incumbent,” and parties are “built and managed from the top down, with rank-and-file members having little power over the important decisions made by leaders.” Melikidze (2022) finds that “political parties are weakly institutionalized and personalized and the level of popular trust in them is low in Georgia,” that parties “have no sense of stability and focus on short-term success,” and that “the personalization of politics and the particular dependence on the leader further aggravate the crisis of party system institutionalization.” An earlier review of international party assistance reached the same conclusion: “It is generally accepted that political parties in Georgia are institutionally weak organisations. They are seen to be driven more by the personality of their leaders than by an ideology or a coherent set of policies” (Foresti et al., 2010).

This is not a recent phenomenon. Numerous parties emerged after independence, but “weak institutionalization and low tolerance of opposition shaped early political competition.” The pattern has persisted across three decades and multiple changes of government, suggesting that the weakness of party institutions is structural rather than circumstantial. Every dominant party of the post-Soviet period, from Gamsakhurdia’s Round Table–Free Georgia and Shevardnadze’s Citizens’ Union to Saakashvili’s UNM and Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream, was built around a single founder and declined or fragmented when that founder’s authority was challenged (Melikidze, 2022).

Public opinion reflects this weakness. As early as 2023, 64% of Georgians believed that none of the political parties represented their interests, and analysts identified two interrelated trends: the growing personalization of politics and a deficit of internal democracy, with informal networks of governance hindering party institutionalization (Lavrelashvili, 2023). The Bertelsmann Transformation Index likewise notes that Georgian parties generally “are not based on democratic decision-making within the party, nor do they represent specific segments of society” (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026).

4.2 Personality as the Organizing Principle

The predominance of personality over program is the defining feature of Georgian party politics. Candidates are selected “on the basis of personality or charisma rather than real policy issues,” and, as one observer put it, “politics in Georgia is about leadership, not representation […], political parties are built largely around personalities rather than constituencies” (Roubanis, 2009). Comparative research on Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine shows that charismatic personalities continue to dominate electoral competition, relegating “ideologies, policies and manifestos” to “an afterthought,” and that the candidate’s charisma and personality remain among the main determinants of the vote (Gherasimov, 2019). Voters themselves reflect this preference: survey data point to “a societal preference for charismatic leaders over comprehensive party programs.”

This personality-centered logic operates at every level. Georgian Dream, despite having been the ruling party for more than a decade, “has yet to establish a clear and sustainable mechanism of internal selection and political succession.” The party’s founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, despite not having held any formal state office for most of the party’s existence, remains “the honorary chairman of the party and is widely regarded as the country’s shadow ruler” (Commonspace.eu, 2025). His personal wealth and network, rather than an institutionalized party structure, constitute the party’s true center of gravity. Prime ministers have come and gone, from Irakli Garibashvili to Giorgi Kvirikashvili, Mamuka Bakhtadze, Giorgi Gakharia and Irakli Kobakhidze, but the rotations have been decided outside the party’s formal bodies and have repeatedly confirmed that executive power is subordinate to the founder’s informal authority (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026).

The opposition is no different. The United National Movement remains “heavily dependent on” Mikheil Saakashvili, who continues to run the party’s affairs from prison, appointing interim leaders and designing internal reforms from his cell. When Saakashvili announced a “Council of Reformers” to restructure the party, the then party chair, Tina Bokuchava, reportedly learned of the decision on social media. In August 2026, the party congress abolished its main leadership posts and replaced them with a temporary governing council headed by Irakli Pavlenishvili, while Saakashvili was appointed to lead the new board of reformers (The Messenger, 2026; DFWatch, 2026). One Georgian commentator captured the absurdity of this arrangement: “When one person decides, solely at his own discretion, who should lead hundreds or thousands of members, it means that the party and its members decide absolutely nothing. It is exactly the same authoritarian organization with informal rule as ‘Georgian Dream.’”

Even the newer parties follow the same template. Lelo for Georgia was created in 2019 by two businessmen, Mamuka Khazaradze and Badri Japaridze, as a personal political vehicle. Girchi was founded by Zurab Japaridze and remains identified with his personal libertarian brand. For Georgia is inseparable from the figure of Giorgi Gakharia. The Alliance of Patriots is chaired by Davit Tarkhan-Mouravi, with Irma Inashvili as secretary general, once again a small ruling clique rather than a mass organization.

4.3 Clientelism and Informal Networks

The personalist character of Georgian parties is inseparable from the clientelist logic that governs electoral competition. Georgia exhibits “high clientelistic efforts and more moderate programmatic efforts” compared with other post-communist states, with parties mobilizing voters through “local leaders who seek to mobilize the electorate by offering a range of private services” rather than through policy proposals. Research published by the Georgian Institute of Politics has documented clientelism as a pervasive feature of Georgian elections and warned that these practices are costly, encourage electoral fraud and create an uneven playing field (Kakhishvili, 2024). The Bertelsmann Transformation Index adds that many citizens “now depend on political patrons, which translates into informal pressure on voting rights by the ruling Georgian Dream party,” and that administrative coordination “suffers from clientelist management and informal decision-making” (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026).

This clientelism operates through informal networks rather than formal party structures. The oligarchs who dominate Georgian politics “have always enjoyed outsized influence… through direct and indirect participation, founding political parties and running them through proxies or themselves, while owning major media outlets.” The result is that “the only obstacle to the total capture of the political sphere by private individuals is the public funding of political parties,” which provides a lifeline to organizations wishing to resist oligarchic control.

Yet not even public funding can fully counteract the personalization of politics. In 2025, a total of GEL 8.9 million was allocated from the state budget to finance six political parties, of which 68% went to Georgian Dream, partly because most opposition parties lost their entitlement to state funding after refusing to take up their parliamentary seats (European Platform for Democratic Elections, 2026). The ruling party received GEL 6.6 million in donations in the first half of 2025 alone, six times more than all other parties combined, while thirteen companies linked to Georgian Dream donors have received more than GEL 27 million in budget subsidies since 2024 (Transparency International Georgia, 2025a). A more recent investigation by the same organization documents a pattern in which ruling-party donors obtain favorable construction and urban planning decisions, a mechanism summed up in the formula “donate to the party and build wherever you want” (Transparency International Georgia, 2026). The financial asymmetry reinforces the political asymmetry and makes it almost impossible for opposition parties to develop the organizational capacity that might eventually turn them into genuine institutions.

4.4 The Hollowing Out of Party Politics from Within

The personalist character of Georgian parties is not merely a matter of leadership style; it shapes the entire logic of political competition. The ruling party has “blurred the boundaries between itself and the state,” using its control over every level of the administration to perpetuate itself in power. Internal party debates are not about policy but about loyalty to the leader. Georgian Dream’s Political Council, the party’s main decision-making body, is made up of people whose chief merit is personal closeness to Ivanishvili rather than an independent political base.

The current wave of arrests within Georgian Dream’s own ranks illustrates how personalist networks operate. Transparency International Georgia has documented that the investigations “selectively targeted certain former senior Georgian Dream officials” and that “those under investigation are mainly members of patronage networks, i.e., clans, linked either to the former head of the State Security Service, Grigol Liluashvili, or to former Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili.” The “anti-corruption” campaign is in reality “a confrontation between clans within the ruling party,” in which investigative bodies are used as weapons in a struggle for Ivanishvili’s favor; as the organization concludes, “this is not a fight against corruption” (Transparency International Georgia, 2025b).

The opposition reproduces this dynamic in weaker form. The UNM has repeatedly fragmented along personal lines. European Georgia split from it in 2017 and, more recently, Nika Melia left to launch a political project of his own; each split was organized around the ambitions of a different leader rather than around substantive policy disagreement.

4.5 Polarization as a Substitute for Program

The absence of programmatic content creates a vacuum that polarization fills. Georgian polarization is predominantly affective and elite-driven: it rests more on emotional rejection of the other camp than on ideological or social differences, and it takes place mainly in the overlapping spaces of politics and media, where hate speech, personal attacks and defamation are routine (Malerius, 2024). The main television channels function as mouthpieces for political clienteles: Imedi, POSTV and Rustavi 2 are aligned with the government, and Mtavari, Pirveli and Formula with the opposition. Survey data suggest that most voters would prefer less confrontation and more debate on unemployment, infrastructure and health, indicating that political polarization is not a faithful reflection of social polarization but “an elite discourse far removed from social reality” (Malerius, 2024).

This observation is relevant to the argument of this article. If polarization were rooted in deep social cleavages, it would sustain programmatic parties representing distinct constituencies. Because it originates instead in elite rivalry, it reinforces personalization: each camp is defined by loyalty to, or hatred of, a particular leader, and the substantive questions of social and economic policy that structure party competition elsewhere remain marginal.

4.6 Analytical Assessment

In sum, Georgia has political parties in the formal and legal sense: they register with the Central Election Commission, receive state funding, contest elections and hold seats in parliament. But they are not “real” parties in the sense of durable organizations with internal democracy, programmatic coherence and roots in civil society. They are, with few exceptions, personal vehicles for leaders who use them to gain access to power and resources. The weakness of party institutions and the predominance of personality reinforce each other: because parties lack organizational capacity of their own, they depend on leaders for resources and direction; because leaders control the resources, they can prevent the institutionalization that might constrain their personal authority.

This has profound implications for Georgia’s democratic trajectory. A party system based on personalities rather than institutions can hardly produce the stable, programmatic competition that democratic governance requires. When parties are extensions of individual leaders, the fall of a leader can mean the fall of the party; when parties are organized around patronage rather than policy, elections become contests over access to private goods rather than debates about public priorities. The current crisis, in which a single billionaire effectively controls the ruling party and an imprisoned former president leads the main opposition force, is not an anomaly but the logical outcome of a party system that was never allowed to institutionalize.

The question of whether Georgia has “real” parties is therefore not merely academic. It points to the deeper question of whether Georgian democracy has the institutional foundations needed to withstand the pressures, internal and external, that it currently faces.

5. The Current Political Crisis: Democratic Backsliding and One-Party Consolidation

Georgia’s democratic backsliding accelerated sharply in 2025 and continued through 2026, raising new doubts about the country’s European future. Over the past five years, Georgia has recorded significant declines in six factors of democratic performance, including Credible Elections, Civil Society and Civil Liberties, with harsh repression of protesters and a hostile media environment that puts Freedom of Expression at risk (International IDEA, 2026). Freedom House downgraded Georgia’s global freedom score from 55 to 51 out of 100 in its 2026 report, with 19 of 40 points for political rights and 32 of 60 for civil liberties (Freedom House, 2026). The ruling Georgian Dream party has expanded its efforts to criminalize dissent and punish the opposition, penalizing protests and creating a blacklist of people barred from holding political office.

5.1 The October 2024 Elections and Their Aftermath

The October 2024 parliamentary elections proved a decisive turning point. International election observers criticized their conduct, noting widespread pressure on voters to support the ruling party and concerns about the independence of state institutions (OSCE/ODIHR, 2024), as well as evidence of irregular patterns in polling-station data pointing to some degree of vote buying. President Salome Zourabichvili rejected the results as grossly rigged and declared that the president and the opposition would not reconcile themselves to fraudulent elections. Most opposition parties refused to take up their seats, leaving a parliament that the European Parliament would later describe as a “de facto one-party parliament” (European Parliament, 2026).

On 28 November 2024, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that Georgia would not seek EU accession negotiations or EU budget support until 2028, triggering nightly mass protests in Tbilisi and other cities and an open letter of protest signed by more than a hundred serving diplomats (Deutsche Welle, 2024; Reuters, 2024a). On 14 December 2024, an electoral college dominated by Georgian Dream elected former footballer and People’s Power co-founder Mikheil Kavelashvili as president, in the first presidential election under the new indirect system (ABC News, 2024). The European Parliament described the rigged October 2024 elections as “a clear turning point towards authoritarian rule,” which paved the way for Georgian Dream to illegitimately capture state institutions and eliminate democratic safeguards (European Parliament, 2025).

5.2 The Legal Architecture of Repression

The regime’s repressive apparatus has expanded considerably through legislation. In March 2025, Georgia’s ruling party adopted a stricter “foreign agents” law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires persons or entities to register as foreign agents if they act under the vaguely defined “influence” of a foreign principal or receive funding from one and engage in “political activities.” Failure to register carries criminal fines of up to GEL 10,000 (about USD 3,600) or a prison sentence of up to five years, or both (Parliament of Georgia, 2025). Human Rights Watch has noted that the human rights situation in Georgia has deteriorated drastically since its last Universal Periodic Review in 2021, as the authorities have adopted an arsenal of laws incompatible with the country’s commitments on freedom of expression, assembly and association (Human Rights Watch, 2025).

The legislative offensive continued in 2026. The March 2026 amendments to the Law on Grants, the Criminal Code, the Code of Administrative Offenses, the Organic Law on Political Associations of Citizens and the Law on the State Audit Office created a more restrictive and punitive framework than the 2025 rules: they extended the definition of a grant to technical assistance and expertise, and made virtually any foreign support for civic or political activity conditional on government consent (International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, 2026). FIDH and its partners described the package as legislation that “criminalizes human rights work” (FIDH, 2026).

Media regulation has followed the same logic. In October 2026, the Communications Commission barred the government-critical broadcasters Formula and TV Pirveli from using a total of 93 words and expressions, including “regime,” “political prisoners,” “prisoners of conscience,” “oligarch,” “repressive laws” and “judicial clan,” invoking the impartiality provisions of the Law on Broadcasting and imposing escalating fines (JAMnews, 2026). The arrest and two-year prison sentence of Mzia Amaglobeli, founder of the independent outlets Batumelebi and Netgazeti and a 2025 Sakharov Prize laureate, became emblematic of the pressure on independent journalism (Committee to Protect Journalists, 2026; International Federation of Journalists, 2025). After Reporters Without Borders added Ivanishvili to its list of “press freedom predators” in 2025, one regional outlet concluded that Tbilisi now hosts a “press freedom predator” (Eurasianet, 2025).

5.3 The Elimination of the Organized Opposition

After the disputed elections, Georgian Dream moved decisively to eliminate the organized political opposition. In February 2025, a Temporary Parliamentary Investigative Commission chaired by Tea Tsulukiani was set up to investigate the alleged crimes of the 2003–2012 government. Opposition leaders who refused to appear before it, including Nika Gvaramia, Zurab Japaridze, Badri Japaridze, Mamuka Khazaradze, Nika Melia and Irakli Okruashvili, were sentenced to seven to eight months in prison and barred from holding public office for two years (European Parliament, 2026; Freedom House, 2026). In November 2025, eight prominent opposition figures faced new charges of “crimes committed against the state” (Freedom House, 2026).

In October 2025, the ruling party filed a petition with the Constitutional Court asking it to declare three major opposition parties unconstitutional and ban them: the United National Movement, the Coalition for Change and Strong Georgia–Lelo (Anjaparidze, 2025). The petition, based on the Tsulukiani Commission’s report, invoked human rights abuses under the UNM, the previous government’s conduct during the August 2008 war, the opposition’s electoral boycotts and the opposition’s alleged “support” for a “foreign force” to undermine Georgia’s independence. In April 2026 the Federalists party, led by Giga Bokeria and Tamar Chergoleishvili, was added to the list, and in September the For Georgia party, which remained the only opposition force with parliamentary representation (Civil Georgia, 2026a). Because Georgian Dream withdrew and refiled the petition each time it added parties, the nine-month deadline for a ruling was reset twice; the Court must now rule by June 2027 at the latest (Civil Georgia, 2026a).

On 8 October 2026, the European Parliament adopted a resolution demanding the “immediate withdrawal” of the constitutional petition, describing the procedure as an attempt to “eliminate the legitimate political opposition” and calling for the release of political prisoners, including Elene Khoshtaria, Mzia Amaglobeli, Mikheil Saakashvili and Nika Melia (Caucasian Knot, 2026; Civil Georgia, 2026a). On 13 October 2026, the full seven-judge Court admitted the case for examination on the merits; Judge Manana Kobakhidze resigned that same day after her request for recusal was rejected. Hearings opened in Batumi on 21 October 2026 (Civil Georgia, 2026a; Reuters, 2026a).

5.4 The 2025 Local Elections and the Criminalization of Protest

The local elections of 4 October 2025 confirmed the trend. They were held amid a partial opposition boycott, scarce credible observation, the imprisonment of protesters and opposition members and a crackdown on independent media (Civil Georgia, 2025a; Freedom House, 2026). According to preliminary official results, Georgian Dream won about 81% of the proportional vote and all 64 municipalities, and its candidates ran unopposed in nearly half of the mayoral races; Kakha Kaladze was re-elected mayor of Tbilisi with 71.55% (Civil Georgia, 2025a).

On election night, tens of thousands of people gathered in Tbilisi, and a group of protesters attempted to enter the grounds of the presidential palace before being dispersed with pepper spray, tear gas and water cannon (Reuters, 2025; Amnesty International, 2025). The ruling party labeled the events an externally orchestrated coup attempt. In the following days, armed special forces conducted dawn raids in several cities; more than 60 people were detained and criminally charged with offenses such as incitement to the violent overthrow of the government, punishable by six to nine years in prison, and pretrial detention was imposed in almost every case (Amnesty International, 2025). The episode gave the government a justification for expanding the party-ban petition and further tightening protest legislation (Anjaparidze, 2025).

5.5 Turning on Its Own

The regime’s consolidation of power has also involved turning on its own. The Georgian Dream government stepped up its offensive against former officials and brought corruption charges against a growing number of them. On 12 January 2026, former Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, once Bidzina Ivanishvili’s closest and most loyal ally, was sentenced to five years in prison under a plea agreement in a money-laundering case (Anadolu Agency, 2026). Weeks earlier, Grigol Liluashvili, former head of Georgia’s State Security Service, was arrested on corruption charges, including the alleged protection of fraudulent call centers; on 16 September 2026 he was sentenced to 13 years in prison (Civil Georgia, 2026b; Reuters, 2026b). Many in Georgia see this campaign either as a power struggle between rival “clans” or as part of a broader transformation of the regime, in which political and financial resources are increasingly concentrated in a single center of control (Shamanauri, 2026; Transparency International Georgia, 2025b).

5.6 Analytical Assessment

The sequence of events since October 2024 shows a regime moving from the manipulation of competition to its abolition. The legal instruments adopted in 2024–2026 have targeted, in succession, the resources of civil society, the vocabulary of independent media and the legal existence of opposition parties. At the same time, the purges within the ruling party show that consolidation is directed not only against opponents but also at eliminating autonomous centers of power within the regime itself. Taken together, these developments indicate a transition from a competitive authoritarian system, in which elections were unfair but meaningful, toward a hegemonic system in which the ruling party seeks to monopolize both the state and the political field.

6. Socioeconomic and Class Perspectives: Elite Capture and Popular Precarity

6.1 A Narrow Elite, a Thin Intermediate Layer and a Precarious Majority

Georgia’s political crisis cannot be understood without examining the socioeconomic structures that underpin it. Georgian society continues to be characterized by a relatively narrow elite, a thin intermediate layer—composed mainly of the petty bourgeoisie and skilled wage earners—and a large majority engaged in the daily struggle for subsistence. The labor market is largely deregulated and the social system covers only basic needs (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2025). This structural inequality shapes political behavior and limits the prospects for democratic consolidation. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index describes Georgia as “a deeply divided society, in which political polarization exacerbates inequalities between the urban and rural populations and between the traditional and modern sectors of the economy,” and notes that a welfare system “based on neoliberal principles has struggled to provide equitable development opportunities” (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026).

6.2 Growth without Inclusion

Economically, Georgia presents the paradox of robust growth accompanied by persistent structural weaknesses. Real GDP grew by 7.5% in 2025, and nominal GDP reached GEL 104.59 billion, well above its pre-pandemic trend for the fifth consecutive year (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026a; World Bank, 2026a). However, part of this growth has been linked to trade and financial flows associated with the circumvention of sanctions against Russia, Chinese investment, Russian capital and Gulf-financed construction, sources far more volatile than commodity rents and less amenable to redistribution (Kitachaev, 2025). Structural challenges persist, with high unemployment, particularly among young people, and significant income inequality. Unemployment fell from 16.4% in 2023 to 13.9% in 2024 (World Bank, 2025) and remained at 13.9% in 2025; it was highest in the 15–19 age group, at 39.0% (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026b). Youth unemployment in the 15–24 age group stood at around 30% (30.3%) in 2025, according to the modeled ILO estimate (World Bank, 2026b). The long-term unemployed, that is, those out of work for twelve months or more, accounted for 37.0% of all unemployed persons in 2024 (Federal Statistical Office of Germany, 2026). Both employment and the labor force declined in 2025, a sign that high growth has not translated into proportional job creation (Georgia Today, 2026).

6.3 Inequality and Poverty

Income inequality, although showing some improvement, remains considerable. Georgia had the highest income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, among the countries of the Eastern Partnership of the European Neighbourhood Policy for most of the 2013–2023 period, although the coefficient fell from 42.1 in 2013 to 36.0 in 2023. In 2025, the Gini coefficient based on total income fell to 0.34. The absolute poverty rate declined by 2.3 percentage points to 7.1%, compared with 22.0% in 2016, although rural poverty (9.0%) remains significantly higher than urban poverty (6.0%) (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026c).

Table 2. Selected socioeconomic indicators, Georgia, 2025

Indicator	Value	Source
Real GDP growth	7.5%	National Statistics Office of Georgia (2026a)
Nominal GDP	GEL 104.59 billion	National Statistics Office of Georgia (2026a)
Unemployment rate	13.9%	National Statistics Office of Georgia (2026b)
Unemployment rate, ages 15–19	39.0%	National Statistics Office of Georgia (2026b)
Youth unemployment, ages 15–24 (modeled ILO estimate)	30.3%	World Bank (2026b)
Long-term unemployed, share of total unemployed (2024)	37.0%	Federal Statistical Office of Germany (2026)
Gini coefficient (total income)	0.34	National Statistics Office of Georgia (2026c)
Absolute poverty rate	7.1% (rural 9.0%, urban 6.0%)	National Statistics Office of Georgia (2026c)
Net remittances	USD 3,228.5 million	Ministry of Finance of Georgia (2026)

The improvement in the main poverty indicators is real and should not be dismissed. It helps explain why the ruling party has been able to retain a substantial electoral base despite its authoritarian turn: for many households, especially outside Tbilisi, the experience of the past decade has been one of modest material improvement and relative stability. Yet the improvement coexists with high unemployment, low wages in agriculture and services, and a dependence on transfers that leaves households exposed to political pressure.

6.4 Gender Inequalities, Emigration and Remittance Dependence

The wage gap also remains notable: women earn on average 1.5 times less than men, revealing deep structural gender inequalities. Georgia relies heavily on remittances from the 23% of the labor force working abroad. Net remittances reached USD 3,228.5 million in 2025, up 8.2% on the previous year, with the United States, Italy and Germany as the main sources of growth (Ministry of Finance of Georgia, 2026). Over the past decade, remittances have averaged between 12% and 15% of GDP, and cumulative net emigration since independence is estimated at around 1.3 million people, roughly 30% of the current population (International Monetary Fund, 2025). This dependence on external sources of income reflects the weakness of the domestic economy and the limited opportunities available to most of the population.

Emigration has ambiguous political effects. It acts as a safety valve, exporting discontent and importing income, and it reduces the number of young and educated citizens, those most likely to support the opposition and to vote. At the same time, the concentration of the diaspora in EU countries and the United States materially links a significant share of Georgian households to the West, which helps explain why popular support for European integration has remained high even as the government has turned its back on it.

6.5 The Political Economy of Elite Capture

The class structure has profound political implications. The informal character of politics, marked by the persistent and significant influence of Georgia’s richest man, Bidzina Ivanishvili, over the ruling party, means that formal democratic institutions lack a genuine social base. The parliamentary democracy normatively enshrined in the constitution largely lacks a social foundation. Behind the modernized façade, centralism, paternalism and clientelism continue to prevail (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2025). The ruling party has blurred the boundaries between itself and the state, compromising the electoral process and becoming the main veto-holding party in Georgia, with control over every level of state administration (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026).

Three mechanisms connect class structure to elite capture. First, the concentration of private wealth in a few hands, above all Ivanishvili’s, allows political power to be privately financed and informally exercised. Second, the dependence of a large part of the population on public employment, social transfers and local patrons turns economic vulnerability into political loyalty, a process documented in the informal pressure on voters reported by election observers (OSCE/ODIHR, 2024; Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026). Third, the weakness of the organized labor movement, a legacy of the 2006 deregulation, deprives the majority of an independent collective voice through which socioeconomic grievances could be articulated programmatically rather than clientelistically (Human Rights Watch, 2019; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2025). The BTI further observes that Georgia combines a high level of “bonding” social capital with a low level of “bridging” social capital, so that trust is concentrated in the family and personal networks rather than in civic associations, a configuration that favors patronage over collective action (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026).

6.6 Unfinished Industrialization, Low Manufacturing Intensity and Rent-Oriented Growth

Georgia’s industrial sector cannot be understood from its current share of GDP; it must be placed within the long trajectory of post-Soviet deindustrialization. Between 1990 and 1994, industrial output fell fivefold compared with the Soviet era and industrial employment fell fourfold; the production of machinery, equipment, tools, electric motors, vehicles and light consumer goods, as well as part of the food industry, came to a complete halt, and manufactured goods lost competitiveness in both domestic and international markets. Industry’s share of GDP fell from 24% in 1990 to 12% in 2000. In 2025, manufacturing accounted for about 9.1% of GDP and agriculture, forestry and fishing for 5.9%, while wholesale and retail trade, transportation and storage, and information and communication were the dominant sectors of the economy (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026a). This means that Georgian “industrialization” is largely an unfinished or even reversed process: it is not a classic case of structural transformation in which labor moves from agriculture to manufacturing, but one in which manufacturing employment and output contract and the workforce “returns” to agriculture or flows into low-productivity services.

The internal composition of manufacturing likewise reveals its structural weaknesses. In 2025, manufacturing value added was GEL 8,354 million, lower than that of wholesale and retail trade (GEL 13,540 million) and real estate activities (GEL 8,556 million) (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026a). The allocative efficiency of manufacturing has remained virtually stagnant since 2005, in contrast to the experiences of Ukraine and Hungary, which show that kick-starting stagnant allocative efficiency in manufacturing is crucial to avoiding economic stagnation. Growth in the industrial sector has been driven largely by construction (8.0% of GDP in 2025) and mining (0.95%), rather than by manufacturing branches capable of technological upgrading and labor absorption. This pattern implies that, although GDP growth averaged more than 9% a year between 2021 and 2025, manufacturing did not become a vehicle for broad-based growth in employment and income: in 2025 the unemployment rate was 13.9%, the rate for the 15–19 age group reached 39.0% and the long-term unemployed (more than twelve months) accounted for 37.0% of all unemployed persons (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026b; World Bank, 2026b).

Even more decisive is the source of growth. The International Monetary Fund notes that strong growth since 2021 was driven by the expansion of the information and communication technology and transport services sectors, supported by migration, financial flows and transit trade triggered by the war in Ukraine (International Monetary Fund, 2025). The Economic Policy Research Center puts it more bluntly: Georgia’s economic boom was based on temporary factors that are now fading; the country became a transit corridor for sanctioned goods bound for Russia, and in 2025 car re-exports to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan reached USD 2.81 billion (Economic Policy Research Center, 2026). Economic policy research has conceptualized this pattern as a “sanctions bubble”: Georgian economic and political elites turn re-exports, the transfer of dual-use technology and lax financial regulation into sources of income, so that the Georgian economy becomes structurally dependent on Russia-linked capital flows and sanctions cease to be an instrument of deterrence and become an opportunity for enrichment (Economic Policy Research Center, 2026). For class analysis, this means that sanctions arbitrage does not nourish a productive industrial bourgeoisie but a comprador commercial-financial layer, whose profits come from occupying regulatory and geopolitical loopholes rather than from rising productivity or fixed capital formation.

Consequently, the class consequences of Georgia’s industrial and manufacturing sector differ radically from the classical model of industrialization. It has created neither a large industrial proletariat nor a national bourgeoisie based on manufacturing profits. The weak manufacturing base and rent-oriented growth mean that the dominant form of capital accumulation is the capture by commercial and financial capital of land rents, transit rents and sanctions rents, rather than the production of industrial surplus value. This directly limits the formation of classes based on wage labor and means that political competition revolves more around control of state posts and rent channels than around distributive conflicts between productive classes.

6.7 Peasant Agriculture, Land Fragmentation and the Agro-Industrial Disconnect

Agriculture accounted for 5.9% of GDP in 2025, far below its real importance in employment and social reproduction (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026a). It employs nearly 40% of the workforce, some 1.24 million people, of whom approximately 98% work on family farms. Yet this weight in employment does not reflect agricultural productivity but agriculture’s function as a buffer for post-industrial employment: during the deindustrialization of the 1990s, labor expelled from manufacturing “returned” to agriculture, giving rise to an agricultural structure characterized by small plots and semi-subsistence production.

The land tenure regime is central to understanding this structure. The privatization and distribution of land in the 1990s produced holdings averaging approximately 0.75 hectares, most of them between 3,000 square meters and 2 hectares; 98.3% of holdings are smaller than 5 hectares. The vast majority practice subsistence or semi-subsistence farming, and only a small share of output reaches the market. In 2024, the share of informal employment in rural areas was 34.4%, compared with 26.0% in urban areas (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026b). Low agricultural productivity, land fragmentation, insufficient technology transfer and high input costs are the sector’s structural bottlenecks. The International Monetary Fund identifies low agricultural productivity, high income inequality, emigration and informality as among the main factors limiting Georgia’s potential growth (International Monetary Fund, 2025).

The class implications of this agricultural structure are profound. It has produced neither an agrarian bourgeoisie with sufficient economic independence—because the overwhelming majority of producers are smallholders and semi-subsistence farmers—nor an agricultural proletariat living from agricultural wage labor—because landless agricultural workers are a virtually nonexistent class in the Georgian countryside. The dominant class position in rural areas is that of the semi-proletarianized peasant: owning little land, producing for self-consumption and depending simultaneously on emigrant remittances, state transfers or temporary non-farm work to reproduce the household. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung summarizes this situation as a structure of “a relatively small elite, a thin middle class and a large majority engaged in the daily struggle for subsistence,” which “often depends on remittances from labor migration and on the subsistence economy” (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2025). This class structure is not a residue of agricultural “backwardness” but a product of post-Soviet structural transformation: when industrial employment collapsed, agriculture was forced to act as the last guarantor of social reproduction, and its peasant form precisely prevented the transformation of agriculture into capitalist farming.

Hence the structural disconnect between agriculture and industry. In the classical development literature, agriculture supports industrialization by supplying cheap food, releasing labor and creating demand for industrial goods. In Georgia, the low productivity and semi-subsistence character of agriculture mean that it can neither offer a broad market to manufacturing—because the cash income of smallholders is very low and unstable—nor finance industrial investment through an agricultural surplus. At the same time, agricultural exports—wine (about a quarter of the value of agricultural exports in 2024), hazelnuts (Georgia is the world’s sixth-largest exporter), mineral water and soft drinks—are indeed growing: between January and August 2025, agricultural exports reached USD 1,118 million (National Statistics Office of Georgia, 2026a). But this export specialization mainly benefits agro-industrial and commercial capital (wineries, hazelnut processors, exporters), not smallholders, who sell their products through trust networks and informal market channels with very little bargaining power; land fragmentation further weakens their capacity to reliably supply the quantities and qualities required by buyers and processors. The growth of agricultural exports coexists with persistent rural poverty, showing that the agricultural surplus is not distributed downward through the class structure but is captured by the processing, marketing and export links of the chain.

6.8 From the “Middle Class” to Scientific Class Categories

Although the terms “middle class” or “thin intermediate layer” are used to describe Georgian social structure, these expressions are not wrong in a descriptive sense, but analytically they should be replaced by more precise class categories. The central feature of Georgian social structure is not that the “middle class” is weak, but the specific form of class differentiation: a big bourgeoisie whose core is oligopolistic capital controlling the state through informal networks; a bureaucratic-managerial layer dependent on state posts and public resources; a petty bourgeoisie engaged in small businesses in trade, services and agriculture; and a majority made up of semi-proletarianized labor and informal employment.

Oligopolistic capital and the ruling class. Georgia’s most visible feature is the concentration of political and economic power in a single oligarch. Ivanishvili’s fortune was estimated at about USD 7.6 billion in 2023, equivalent to a quarter of Georgia’s GDP. His wealth is based mainly on Russian assets; he owns an extensive network of companies and uses control of the judiciary and other state institutions to protect his own power and wealth and those of his allies (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026). This control is exercised not through a formal industrial monopoly but through the informal allocation of economic opportunities by political power. Transparency International Georgia documents a typical mechanism: ruling-party donors obtain favorable construction and urban planning decisions, a mechanism summed up in the formula “donate to the party and build wherever you want” (Transparency International Georgia, 2026). The Georgian ruling class therefore cannot simply be equated with the “bourgeoisie” or the “business elite”; it is a political-economic complex in which economic power and political power are jointly held and reproduced within a single oligopolistic network.

State-dependent layers and the public-sector petty bourgeoisie. Below oligopolistic capital lies a sizable layer that depends on state salaries and public resources. Among formal employees, around 60% outside Tbilisi work in the public sector. This “state-dependent layer”—civil servants, teachers, health workers, low-ranking officers and technicians—reproduces its material existence directly from the state budget and the political decisions of the ruling party. Its class position is neither that of the bourgeoisie nor that of the proletariat in the strict sense, but that of a service class dependent on state redistribution. In elections, this dependence translates into clientelist pressure: the BTI notes that many citizens “now depend on political patrons, which translates into informal pressure on voting rights by the ruling Georgian Dream party” (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2026; see also OSCE/ODIHR, 2024). The social existence of this layer does not in itself generate a democratic demand; on the contrary, when a state post is its main source of income, maintaining the ruling party’s control may be part of its material interest.

Petty bourgeoisie: small proprietors in trade, services and agriculture. The Georgian “intermediate layer” is largely a petty bourgeoisie, not a salaried professional-managerial middle stratum. It includes small traders, shopkeepers, restaurant owners, transport operators, the self-employed and the semi-subsistence smallholders analyzed above. Its economic independence is limited and highly dependent on informal networks and market niches. As historical sociology observes, a century ago only an “insignificant” proportion of the Georgian “petty bourgeoisie” was “economically independent of the state and relatively well-off.” Today’s petty bourgeoisie likewise lacks the material base to form an independent political program: its scale of operation is small, its capitalization is low and its dependence on state and local patronage networks is high. That is why calling it a “middle class” conceals the fragility and dependence of its class position.

The semi-proletariat and class differentiation in agriculture. Georgia’s largest class group is the semi-proletarianized working population: formal employment covers only about a third of the working-age population, and the rest depend on informal employment, subsistence farming, remittances and temporary wage labor. In the countryside, this class position takes the form of a combination of semi-subsistence peasant production and labor emigration; in the city, it takes the form of unstable employment in informal services and construction. This class is the majority in number but organizationally the weakest: the 2006 labor reform drastically cut labor protections, abolished the labor inspectorate and allowed verbal contracts and dismissal without cause, systematically weakening the basis for collective labor organization (Human Rights Watch, 2019; Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2025). Without organized wage labor, the economic discontent of the semi-proletariat cannot be expressed as programmatic class politics, but only through clientelist networks, migratory exit or episodic protest.

This class map explains a central observation of this article: why political competition is organized around individuals and patronage networks rather than around programmatic class interests. When the largest class group is semi-proletarianized and lacks collective organization, when the “intermediate layer” is a petty bourgeoisie dependent on informal networks and when the struggle among the dominant classes centers on control of state rent channels rather than on the formulation of industrial policy, parties have no electoral incentive to build political programs based on alliances of productive classes. The “middle class” discourse is, in this structure, an ideological substitute: it uses the language of income stratification to conceal the substantive class differences between oligopolistic capital, state-dependent layers and the petty bourgeoisie, and it makes a political order centered on elite networks appear as the “natural” outcome of a “still immature middle class.”

6.9 Synthesis: Economic Structure and the Class-Political Equilibrium

By combining sectoral analysis with class analysis, the article’s political argument can be given a firmer economic foundation. The Georgian economic model—low manufacturing intensity, rent-oriented growth, semi-subsistence peasant agriculture and informal control of the state by oligopolistic capital—produces a specific class-political equilibrium: the ruling elite needs neither a large industrial proletariat nor an independent agrarian bourgeoisie to maintain its power; it relies on control of rent channels, on the distributive loyalty of state-dependent layers and on the clientelist mobilization of the semi-proletariat. In this equilibrium, formal democratic institutions lack a corresponding social base: there is no organized working class demanding procedural representation, no independent bourgeoisie demanding legal protection of property rights—because such protection can be obtained through informal networks—and no economically self-sufficient petty bourgeoisie demanding limits on state intervention. The FES observation that the parliamentary democracy enshrined in the Constitution “largely lacks a social foundation” is thus supported by economic analysis (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2025).

This analysis does not alter the article’s thesis on democratic backsliding and elite capture; it anchors it in concrete sectoral structures and class relations. The weak industrial base means that manufacturing interests cannot form a counterweight to the rent-oriented accumulation model; the peasant structure of agriculture means that the rural population cannot become a stable social base for procedural politics; and the fusion of oligopolistic capital with state institutions means that the core of electoral competition is control over the distribution of rents rather than the choice of a development model. Authoritarian consolidation in Georgia is therefore not only the product of a political strategy, but also of the space of possibilities delimited by economic structure and class forms.

6.10 Analytical Assessment

The socioeconomic evidence supports the article’s central thesis. Georgia’s growth model has generated aggregate expansion and a reduction in absolute poverty, but it has not produced a broad intermediate layer with independent economic foundations or organized social interests capable of sustaining programmatic parties. In this configuration, democracy remains a formal shell whose content is supplied by personal networks and private wealth. The ruling party’s authoritarian consolidation feeds on this structure, because the same precarity that fuels discontent also makes large sections of the population dependent on the state that the ruling party controls.

7. Geopolitical Positioning: Between Brussels and Moscow

7.1 The Euro-Atlantic Consensus

Georgia’s geopolitical position has been a defining feature of its political development since independence. Historically, much of Georgian public policy was geared toward securing membership in NATO and the European Union, reflecting the overwhelming popular consensus on Euro-Atlantic integration, a goal enshrined in Article 78 of the constitution. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Georgia applied for membership of the European Union, and polls continued to show strong support for both memberships: an International Republican Institute survey conducted in September and October 2023 found that 86% of respondents supported EU membership and 79% supported NATO membership (Georgia Today, 2023; International Republican Institute, 2023). The European Council granted Georgia candidate status in December 2023, subject to a set of reform priorities. Survey-based research also shows that the successive shocks of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and domestic democratic regression have shaped Georgians’ attitudes toward democracy itself, a reminder that support for European integration and support for democratic institutions are related but not identical (Torres-Adán and Buzogány, 2025).

7.2 From Integration to “Neutrality”

In recent years, however, the ruling Georgian Dream party has backtracked on both goals and promoted a neutrality narrative that weakens Euro-Atlantic integration, normalizes Moscow’s influence and portrays aspirations to NATO and EU membership as unrealistic or destabilizing (Chedia, 2026). In December 2025, Kobakhidze described Georgia and Ukraine as victims of NATO’s “open door” policy and claimed that a genuine open-door policy had never existed, messages that analysts interpret as preparing public opinion for neutrality; that same month, the United Neutral Georgia movement, which enjoys Georgian Dream’s support, registered as a political party (Chedia, 2026).

The government’s position is not ideologically aligned with Russia; instead, it prioritizes regime stability and risk minimization, while keeping EU and NATO rhetoric alive for the domestic audience. As Gvalia and Lomidze (2026) observe, from the government’s perspective such caution “is not ideological sympathy for Russia, but a practical response to Georgia’s exposed position,” and its message “links restraint abroad with stability at home.” This distinction matters. Georgian Dream’s drift toward Moscow owes less to affinity than to calculation: closer relations with Russia entail lower costs for a regime that no longer wishes to meet the democratic conditions of EU membership, and a neutrality stance allows the government to present its isolation from the West as a choice for peace.

7.3 The Economic Dimension

The economic dimension of Georgia’s geopolitical drift is evident. Georgian imports of Russian crude oil increased more than sixteenfold in 2025, reaching USD 95.8 million, with volumes rising from 10,500 to 225,300 tonnes, a jump associated with the start-up of the country’s first oil refinery, at Kulevi, which received its first cargo from Rosneft in October 2025 (Interfax, 2026; Bulin, 2026). Total trade with Russia reached USD 2.69 billion in 2025, up 6.3%, with a trade deficit of USD 1.19 billion (Interfax, 2026). In the first half of 2026, imports from Russia rose by a further 25.6% year on year, to USD 1.2 billion, and Russia supplied 40.5% of all oil and petroleum products imported by Georgia (Economic Policy Research Center, 2026).

Energy dependence has grown in parallel. Gazprom announced that in 2025 it supplied Georgia with 40.4% more gas than in the previous year, and the inadvertent publication of a state decree in January 2026 revealed that Tbilisi was paying more than before for Russian gas (Menabde, 2026; OilPrice.com, 2026). Under the current Georgian Dream government, Tbilisi has maintained growing trade relations with Russia, while its interactions with some Western partners have diminished. Analysts also point to the re-export of vehicles and other high-value goods to Kyrgyzstan and Azerbaijan, a significant share of which is probably destined for Russia, indicating that Georgia’s role as a transit hub has become intertwined with sanctions circumvention (Economic Policy Research Center, 2026).

7.4 The Western Response

The EU’s response has been one of growing concern, punctuated by institutional hesitation. In its 2025 enlargement assessment, the European Commission described Georgia as “a candidate country in name only” and noted that the situation had “further deteriorated significantly” since December of the previous year, when Tbilisi decided to suspend its accession process until 2028, and that the accession process had “de facto come to a halt” (European Commission, 2025; European External Action Service, 2025). The Commission stated that restrictive laws targeting activists, civil society and independent media “threaten the survival of democratic foundations and are unprecedented among candidate countries” (European Commission, 2025; Civil Georgia, 2025b). Presenting the report, Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos declared that “for the Commission, Georgia’s candidate status exists only on paper” (Batumelebi, 2025).

The European Parliament has gone further. Its resolution of 17 June 2026 on the Commission’s report found that Georgian Dream “had not only suspended but de facto reversed Georgia’s European integration course,” that it had intensified its “trajectory towards full authoritarianism” and that its methods of repression and disinformation “replicate Russian hybrid tactics” (European Parliament, 2026). Concrete measures, however, have been limited. In 2024, the EU suspended EUR 121.3 million in direct financial assistance to the government and froze assistance under the European Peace Facility; in January 2025, the Council partially suspended the visa facilitation agreement for holders of diplomatic passports; and in March 2026, the Commission suspended for twelve months, across the EU, visa-free travel for holders of diplomatic, service and official passports, while preserving visa-free travel for ordinary citizens (European External Action Service, 2026). The EU has struggled to adopt broader sanctions owing to a lack of unanimity among member states. The United States added Ivanishvili to its Russia-related sanctions program on 27 December 2024, and in February 2026 the United Kingdom sanctioned the pro-government channels Imedi and POSTV for spreading disinformation about Russia’s war against Ukraine (Office of Foreign Assets Control, 2024; JAMnews, 2026).

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has dismissed EU pressure as “shameful double standards” and argued that joining sanctions would cause the Georgian economy to contract by at least ten percent (Imedi News, 2025). Analysts have pointed to the asymmetry between Western rhetoric and action, observing that the West “simply tolerates Ivanishvili” and avoids serious pressure, partly for fear of pushing Tbilisi further toward Russia (Kitachaev, 2025).

7.5 The Symbolic Arena

The geopolitical contest over Georgia is perhaps most visible in the symbolic arena. The appearance of Georgian Prime Minister Kobakhidze alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Forum of the International Year of Peace and Trust held in Ashgabat in December 2025, the first time since the 2008 war that the leaders of the two countries had appeared together at an international forum, fueled speculation about back-channel contacts and signaled a symbolic post-2008 thaw (Chedia, 2026; Khachidze, 2025). An official of the Russian Foreign Ministry praised Georgia’s participation as a sign of “healthy pragmatism” and a “multi-vector foreign policy.” On 17 December 2025, parliament abolished the Temporary Administration of South Ossetia, a body created in 2007 to assert the region’s legal belonging to Georgia, in a move that matched a long-standing Russian demand (Chedia, 2026). The deepening of economic, infrastructural and informational ties with Russia, including energy dependence, trade routes and media messaging, illustrates Georgia’s strategic drift toward Moscow, where “neutrality” works more in favor of Russian influence than as genuine independence (Chedia, 2026).

7.6 The Georgian Orthodox Church

The Georgian Orthodox Church has also become an arena of geopolitical contestation. Under the late Patriarch Ilia II, who led the Church from 1977 until his death on 17 March 2026, the Church consolidated its position as one of Georgia’s most influential and most trusted institutions. A 2002 constitutional agreement with the state gave it a consultative role in policymaking, tax exemptions, state funding and extensive property rights, and under Ilia II it enjoyed the support of more than 80% of Georgians (Kitachaev, 2026). The Church supported the legislation on “family values and protection of minors,” aligned with conservative social positions, as well as the 2024 law on “transparency of foreign influence,” which brought it closer to Georgian Dream (Kitachaev, 2026).

The election of Metropolitan Shio as Patriarch Shio III on 11 May 2026, amid allegations of Georgian Dream interference, opaque procedures and Russian influence, has intensified internal polarization and raised concerns about the institutional independence and political neutrality of the Patriarchate (Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, 2026; Civil Georgia, 2026c). Before the election, analysts warned that Ilia II’s successor would inherit considerable power without his level of public trust, and that the Church risked losing its unifying role and becoming an instrument of ultraconservative ideology in the political conflict (Kitachaev, 2026). The convergence between the Church’s social conservatism and the government’s sovereigntist narrative gives Georgian Dream access to a powerful source of cultural legitimacy, which presents estrangement from the EU as a defense of national tradition.

7.7 Analytical Assessment

Georgia’s geopolitical drift is better understood as an instrument of domestic regime maintenance than as a strategic reorientation driven by ideological conviction. The government uses neutrality to reduce the external costs of authoritarian consolidation, economic ties with Russia to diversify away from conditional Western support, and the Church to anchor its project in national identity. The Western response, harsh in rhetoric but cautious in substance, has so far raised the costs of this strategy without changing its direction. The decisive variable remains domestic: a population that still overwhelmingly favors European integration, governed by an elite whose survival increasingly depends on preventing it.

8. Conclusion

Georgia stands at a crossroads. The country’s political trajectory, from the hopeful days of the Rose Revolution, through the democratic opening of 2012, to the current consolidation of one-party rule, reflects the profound difficulty of building stable democratic institutions in a context of weak state capacity, deep socioeconomic inequality and intense geopolitical competition. The ruling Georgian Dream party has successfully weathered waves of accusations of widespread electoral fraud, Western criticism and street protests and, although there are no serious threats to the ruling party visible for now, it is taking no chances and has increased pressure on its opponents, reinforcing the de facto one-party system ahead of the next electoral cycle (Kitachaev, 2025). The opening of the Constitutional Court hearings on banning the five main opposition parties in October 2026 marks the most explicit step yet in that direction.

The analysis presented here has shown that this outcome is rooted in structural conditions rather than in the decisions of a single leader. The weakness of the state and the strength of informal networks, inherited from the collapse of the 1990s, have survived every change of government. A party system organized around personalities and patronage has prevented the emergence of programmatic competition and turned each ruling party into an extension of its founder. A growth model that reduced absolute poverty without generating a broad, independent middle class or an organized labor movement has left large sections of the population dependent on the state and on political patrons. And Georgia’s position between Russia and the West has supplied both the resources and the narratives with which competing elites mobilize support and delegitimize their opponents.

Nevertheless, the regime’s authoritarian project remains incomplete. As one analysis notes, the chances of Georgian Dream succeeding in building a solid and resilient authoritarian regime like those of Azerbaijan, Belarus and Russia still appear slim. The party “has neither the resources, nor the external patrons, nor the unifying national idea to achieve this” (Kitachaev, 2025). Georgia lacks commodity rents that could be redistributed to buy loyalty; Russia, absorbed by its war against Ukraine, is unwilling to sponsor the Georgian regime; and the only plausible unifying national project, the restoration of territorial integrity, can be achieved neither by force nor through an agreement with Moscow. The government also continues to value the remaining benefits of European Union integration, in particular visa-free travel for ordinary citizens, and fears large-scale Western sanctions, which limits the scale of repression it is willing to apply (Kitachaev, 2025). The model of authoritarianism under construction carries risks of destabilizing and reverting to a more liberal political climate.

The fundamental question for Georgia’s future is whether the country’s aspirations to follow the Western model of liberal democracy, shared by a significant majority of the population, can be reconciled with the socioeconomic and geopolitical realities that have so far only resulted in the strengthening of an increasingly authoritarian ruling elite. The answer will depend not only on the decisions of Georgian political actors, but also on the support and pressure of the EU and the international community in defense of the democratic principles they claim to uphold. It will also depend on whether the Georgian opposition manages to overcome the personalism that has defined it and build organizations rooted in society rather than in the authority of individual leaders or the support of foreign partners. Without that transformation, even a change of government would risk reproducing the cycle that this article has described.

References

ABC News. (2024, December 14). Former soccer player Mikheil Kavelashvili becomes Georgia’s president in a blow to its EU aspirations. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-14/mikheil-kavelashvili-becomes-georgia-president/104726732

Amnesty International. (2025). Georgia: Escalating repression and arbitrary arrests threaten right to protest (EUR 56/0450/2025). https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EUR5604502025ENGLISH.pdf

Anadolu Agency. (2026, January 12). Former Georgian prime minister jailed for 5 years in corruption case after guilty plea. https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/former-georgian-prime-minister-jailed-for-5-years-in-corruption-case-after-guilty-plea/3797170

Anjaparidze, Z. (2025, October 29). Georgian Dream uses unrest during local elections as excuse to ban opposition parties. Eurasia Daily Monitor, 22(145). Jamestown Foundation. https://www.ecoi.net/en/document/2132001.html

Batumelebi. (2025, November 4). Georgia called “candidate country in name only” in EU annual enlargement package. https://batumelebi.netgazeti.ge/articles-in-english/593573/

BBC News. (2026). Georgia country profile. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17301647

Bertelsmann Stiftung. (2020). BTI 2020 country report: Georgia. https://www.ecoi.net/en/file/local/2029512/country_report_2020_GEO.pdf

Bertelsmann Stiftung. (2026). BTI 2026 country report: Georgia. https://bti-project.org/en/reports/country-report/GEO

Bulin, O. (2026). New Georgian laws turn the country into a small copy of Russia. Babel. https://babel.ua/en/texts/126101-two-years-ago-georgia-passed-a-law-on-foreign-agents-that-was-a-carbon-copy-of-russia-s-and-it-s-only-gotten-worse-since-then-here-are-the-laws-that-are-turning-georgia-into-a-small-copy-of-russia

Caucasian Knot. (2026, October 8). The European Parliament demanded that “Georgian Dream” withdraw its claim to ban the opposition. https://www.eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/79219

Chedia, B. (2026). Georgia drifting back into Russia’s orbit. Eurasia Daily Monitor. https://www.ecoi.net/en/document/2138179.html

Chkhetiani, L. (2025, March 18). Georgian Dream’s conspirationist brainwashing works. Civil Georgia. https://civil.ge/archives/669807

Civil Georgia. (2025a, October 4–5). Live updates: Local elections and protest. https://civil.ge/archives/704204

Civil Georgia. (2025b, November 4). Georgia “candidate country in name only”: EU Commission enlargement report. https://civil.ge/archives/709546

Civil Georgia. (2026a, October 21). Backgrounder: Constitutional Court starts hearing opposition party ban case. https://civil.ge/archives/754671

Civil Georgia. (2026b, September 16). Former State Security Service head Grigol Liluashvili sentenced to 13 years in prison. https://civil.ge/archives/751568

Civil Georgia. (2026c). Congratulations pour in as Shio III becomes new Patriarch of Georgian Orthodox Church. https://civil.ge/archives/733830

Coda Story. (2020). Investigation alleges Russian money behind political party in neighboring Georgia. https://www.codastory.com/disinformation/georgia-russia-election/

Committee to Protect Journalists. (2026). Mzia Amaglobeli. https://cpj.org/data/people/mzia-amaglobeli/

Commonspace.eu. (2025, May 9). Irakli Kobakhidze reappointed chairman of Georgian Dream. https://www.commonspace.eu/index.php/ru/node/13096

Deutsche Welle. (2024, November 28). Georgia: Thousands protest after PM suspends EU entry bid. https://www.dw.com/en/georgia-thousands-protest-after-pm-suspends-eu-entry-bid/a-70913068

DFWatch. (2026, August 5). Georgia’s UNM replaces leaders with governing council. https://dfwatch.net/georgias-unm-replaces-leaders-with-governing-council-67227/

Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity. (2026, May 11). Election of the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia. https://www.christianunity.va/content/unitacristiani/en/news/2026/2026-05-11-election-of-the-catholicos-patriarch-of-all-georgia.html

Economic Policy Research Center. (2026). Georgia’s economic dependence on Russia: At a dangerous threshold. https://eprc.ge/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/georgias-economic-dependence-on-russia-eng.pdf

EDMO. (2025). “Global War Party”, “second front”, “unprecedented election meddling from the West” and other propaganda narratives dominating Georgian information space. https://edmo.eu/publications/global-war-party-second-front-unprecedented-election-meddling-from-the-west-and-other-propaganda-narratives-dominating-georgian-information-spa/

Eurasianet. (2025, November 10). Tbilisi is now home to a “press freedom predator”. https://www.ecoi.net/en/document/2132914.html

European Commission. (2025). 2025 Communication on EU enlargement policy (COM(2025) 690 final). https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52025DC0690

European External Action Service. (2025). 2025 Communication on EU enlargement policy (extract about Georgia). https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/georgia/2025-communication-eu-enlargement-policy-extract-about-georgia_en

European External Action Service. (2026). The European Union and Georgia. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/georgia/european-union-and-georgia_en

European Parliament. (2025, July 9). Parliament deplores the democratic backsliding and repression in Georgia [Press release]. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20250704IPR29451/parliament-deplores-the-democratic-backsliding-and-repression-in-georgia

European Parliament. (2026). Resolution of 17 June 2026 on the 2025 Commission report on Georgia (P10_TA(2026)0222). https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/308049/EP%20Resolution%20on%202025%20EC%20report%20on%20Georgia.pdf

European Platform for Democratic Elections. (2026). Political party finances in Georgia, 2025. https://epde.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Georgia_report-party-finance-2025.pdf

Federal Statistical Office of Germany. (2026, May 20). Statistical country profile: Georgia (Edition 05/2026). https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Countries-Regions/International-Statistics/Country-Profiles/georgia.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=18

FIDH. (2026, March 18). Georgia: Authorities must repeal new amendments on the Law “On Grants” and other repressive legislation criminalising human rights work. https://www.fidh.org/en/region/europe-central-asia/georgia/georgia-authorities-must-repeal-new-amendments-on-the-law-on-grants

Forbes. (2026). Bidzina Ivanishvili & family. https://www.forbes.com/profile/bidzina-ivanishvili/

Foresti, M., Welton, G., & Jijelava, D. (2010). Review of international assistance to political party and party system development. Case study report: Georgia. Overseas Development Institute. https://cdn.odi.org/media/documents/6877.pdf

Freedom House. (2026). Georgia: Freedom in the World 2026 country report. https://freedomhouse.org/country/georgia/freedom-world/2026

Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. (2025). Gewerkschaftsmonitor Georgien, Mai 2025. https://collections.fes.de/publikationen/ident/fes/20494

Georgia Today. (2023). IRI survey: 86% of respondents support joining the European Union, 79% joining NATO. https://georgiatoday.ge/iri-survey-86-of-respondents-support-joining-the-european-union-79-joining-nato/

Georgia Today. (2026). Unemployment rate in Georgia remains at 13.9% in 2025, Geostat reports. https://georgiatoday.ge/unemployment-rate-in-georgia-remains-at-13-9-in-2025-geostat-reports/

Gherasimov, C. (2019). Political elite renewal in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Chatham House. https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2019-05-14-Political%20Elite%20Renewal.pdf

Gvalia, G., & Lomidze, I. (2026). Georgia’s shifting strategic outlook and its limits. Central Asia-Caucasus Analyst. https://cacianalyst.org/publications/analytical-articles/item/13959-georgias-shifting-strategic-outlook-and-its-limits.html

Human Rights Watch. (2019). “No year without deaths”: A decade of deregulation puts Georgian miners at risk. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/georgia0819_web.pdf

Human Rights Watch. (2025, July 23). Submission to the Universal Periodic Review of Georgia, 51st session. https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/07/23/submission-to-the-universal-periodic-review-of-georgia

IDFI. (2020). Non-government organisations call for adequate response from Georgia’s investigative and security bodies as well as from the State Audit Office on Dossier’s report about the Alliance of Patriots of Georgia. https://idfi.ge/en/ngo-joint-statement-5334

Imedi News. (2025, December 17). Georgian PM says EU’s double standards toward Georgia “shameful”. https://info.imedi.ge/en/politics/8059/georgian-pm-says-eus-double-standards-toward-georgia-shameful

Interfax. (2026, January 20). Georgia’s foreign trade deficit with Russia grows 1.7% in 2025. https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/115710/

International Center for Not-for-Profit Law. (2026). Amendments to Georgia’s Law on Grants and related legislation. https://www.icnl.org/post/news/amendments-to-georgias-law-on-grants-and-related-legislation

International Federation of Journalists. (2025, November 18). Georgia: Appeal confirms two-year sentence for Sakharov Prize laureate. https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/article/georgia-appeal-confirms-two-year-sentence-for-sakharov-prize-laureate

International IDEA. (2026). Georgia. The Global State of Democracy. https://www.idea.int/democracytracker/country/georgia

International Monetary Fund. (2025). Georgia: Selected issues. https://meetings.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/CR/2025/English/1geoea2025002-source-pdf.ashx

International Republican Institute. (2023). Public opinion survey: Residents of Georgia, September–October 2023. https://www.iri.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/CISR-Approved-IRI-Poll-Presentation-Georgia-September-October-2023-For-Public-Distribution.pdf

JAMnews. (2026, October 9). Georgia’s Communications Commission bans two TV companies from using 93 words and phrases. https://jam-news.net/ru/transparency-international-%D0%BE-%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B7%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B5-%D0%B2-%D0%B3%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B7%D0%B8%D0%B8/

Kakhishvili, L. (2024). Electoral clientelism: A key barrier for fair and competitive elections in Georgia (Policy Brief No. 57). Georgian Institute of Politics. https://gip.ge/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Policy-Brief-57-1.pdf

Khachidze, M. (2025, December 12). Georgian PM sparks outcry after appearing at forum alongside Putin in Turkmenistan. Kyiv Post. https://www.kyivpost.com/post/66144

Kitachaev, B. (2025, December 4). Is Georgia on a one-way road to autocracy? Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/12/georgia-repressions-consequences

Kitachaev, B. (2026, March 26). After Ilia II: What will a new Patriarch mean for Georgia? Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2026/03/uhod-patriarha-chto-prineset-smena-glavy-cerkvi-gruzii

Lavrelashvili, T. (2023). Walking a tightrope: Deciphering political trends in Georgia. European Union Institute for Security Studies. https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/briefs/walking-tightrope

Malerius, S. (2024). Polarise and rule! International Reports, 3/2024. Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. https://www.kas.de/en/web/auslandsinformationen/artikel/detail/-/content/polarise-and-rule

Melikidze, G. (2022). Leader versus party: Georgian experience. Politics, 3. Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. https://test.psage.tsu.ge/index.php/Politics/article/view/292/pdf

Menabde, G. (2026). Gazprom increasing natural gas exports to Georgia. Eurasia Daily Monitor. Jamestown Foundation. https://jamestown.org/gazprom-increasing-natural-gas-exports-to-georgia/

Ministry of Finance of Georgia. (2026). Quarterly economic outlook, I quarter 2026. https://www.mof.ge/files/download/2026Q1ENG.pdf/0c050462-94e0-4243-8d7b-f1734cb4ae4f

National Statistics Office of Georgia. (2026a). Gross domestic product of Georgia in 2025 (preliminary). https://www.geostat.ge/media/77718/Gross-Domestic-Product-of-Georgia-in-2025.pdf

National Statistics Office of Georgia. (2026b). Indicators of the labour force (employment and unemployment), 2025. https://www.geostat.ge/media/78710/Indicators-of-the-Labour-Force-(Employment-and-Unemployment)—2025.pdf

National Statistics Office of Georgia. (2026c). Indicators of living conditions: Indicators of poverty and Gini coefficients, 2025. https://www.geostat.ge/media/79203/Indicators-of-Living-Conditions-(Indicators-of-Poverty-and-Gini-Coefficients)—2025.pdf

Office of Foreign Assets Control. (2024). FAQ 1204: Designation of Bidzina Ivanishvili pursuant to E.O. 14024. U.S. Department of the Treasury. https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/1204

OilPrice.com. (2026, January 26). Georgia scrambles after leak reveals rising dependence on Russian gas. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Georgia-Scrambles-After-Leak-Reveals-Rising-Dependence-on-Russian-Gas.html

OSCE/ODIHR. (2024). Georgia, parliamentary elections, 26 October 2024: Final report. https://odihr.osce.org/odihr/elections/georgia/584029

Parliament of Georgia. (2025). Law of Georgia: Foreign Agents Registration Act (No. 399-IIმს-XIმპ). https://matsne.gov.ge/en/document/view/6461578

Rescheto, J., & Pahlke, J. (2023). Georgia: The thorns of the Rose Revolution. Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/georgia-the-thorns-of-the-rose-revolution/a-67536678

Reuters. (2024a, November 28). Georgia says it will not enter EU membership talks until 2028. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/georgia-says-it-will-not-enter-eu-membership-talks-until-2028-snub-brussels-2024-11-28/

Reuters. (2024b, September 17). Georgian parliament approves law curbing LGBT rights. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/georgian-parliament-approves-law-curbing-lgbt-rights-2024-09-17/

Reuters. (2025, October 4). Georgian police clash, detain protesters as ruling party says it won local elections. https://www.reuters.com/world/georgian-police-use-water-cannon-repel-protesters-presidential-palace-2025-10-04/

Reuters. (2026a, October 21). Georgian court begins hearing lawsuit seeking ban on major opposition parties. https://www.reuters.com/business/georgian-court-begins-hearing-lawsuit-seeking-ban-major-opposition-parties-2026-10-21/

Reuters. (2026b, September 16). Georgia sentences ex-security chief to 13 years in bribery case. https://www.reuters.com/world/georgia-sentences-ex-security-chief-13-years-bribery-case-2026-09-16/

Roubanis, I. (2009, July 3). Georgia’s pluralistic feudalism: A frontline report. openDemocracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/georgia-pluralistic-feudalism/

Shamanauri, K. (2026, January 21). Arrests shake Georgian Dream’s inner circle. Eurasia Daily Monitor. Jamestown Foundation. https://jamestown.org/arrests-shake-georgian-dreams-inner-circle/

Silver, G. (2026). Global War Party: The boogeyman of Georgian politics. Geopolitical Monitor; republished by Eurasia Review. https://www.eurasiareview.com/11102026-global-war-party-the-boogeyman-of-georgian-politics-analysis/

The Messenger. (2026, August 6). UNM elects interim leadership, Saakashvili to head new reformers’ board. http://www.messenger.com.ge/issues/6200_august_6_2026/6200_liza1.html

Torres-Adán, Á., & Buzogány, A. (2025). Democratic backsliding in the shadow of crises: How pandemics, war and democratic regression impact attitudes towards democracy in Georgia. Contemporary Politics. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2025.2550128

Transparency International Georgia. (2025a). Party financing in the first half of 2025: Financial domination of Georgian Dream. https://transparency.ge/en/blog/party-financing-first-half-2025-financial-domination-georgian-dream

Transparency International Georgia. (2025b, December 15). Pretending to fight corruption: Investigative agencies in service of Georgian Dream internal clan war. https://www.transparency.ge/en/blog/pretending-fight-corruption-investigative-agencies-service-georgian-dream-internal-clan-war

Transparency International Georgia. (2026, September 16). Donate to the party and build wherever you want: The scheme of “Georgian Dream” donors in Adjara. https://transparency.ge/en/blog/donate-party-and-build-wherever-you-want-scheme-georgian-dream-donors-adjara

Uppsala Conflict Data Program. (n.d.). Georgia: Government. https://ucdp.uu.se/statebased/812

World Bank. (2025). Macro poverty outlook: Georgia, April 2025. https://thedocs.worldbank.org/en/doc/77351105a334213c64122e44c2efe523-0500072021/related/mpo-sm25-eca.pdf

World Bank. (2026a). Macro poverty outlook: Georgia. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099827408042613975/pdf/Bulk-609aec2b-fc39-4438-a41a-5f4c23a51cd2.pdf

World Bank. (2026b). Unemployment, youth total (% of total labor force ages 15–24) (modeled ILO estimate): Georgia [Data set]. World Development Indicators. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.1524.ZS?locations=GE