The following is a guest post on yesterday’s Georgian parliamentary elections by political scientist Julie George of Queen’s College in the City University of New York. Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili, has recently conceded that his party has lost these elections.
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In the U.S., the 1800 election between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams brought about what current political scientists look for in nascent democracies: a transfer of power from one party to another through elections. What is often disregarded in today’s commentaries about successful democratic transition, however, is a peaceful outcome of the 1800 election was not assured. Reportedly, Federalist leaning actors in the northeastern US considered militia mobilization to forestall Jefferson’s success. What is also notable is that America’s course towards democracy stumbled along for decades, if not a century before its own consolidation. Samuel Huntington ascribed it democratic status at 1823 – the year that voting rights inclusion was granted to over half of the male population (arguably a reasonable standard for the age). But it wasn’t until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 until the restrictions of the Jim Crow South were lifted for African Americans there.
Yesterday’s parliamentary election in the former Soviet Georgia, of course, must live up to modern standards and the precedents established by current contemporaries. But the comparisons between the Georgian condition and the American historical precedent are nonetheless interesting. For one, although overall the preliminary comments on the election-day events showed precedent-blasting participation levels and reasonable conduct, serious and unacceptable violations of intimidation and harassment occurred. The counting process in several precincts of the Khashuri district were interrupted by armed troops, which kicked out the observers and allegedly altered the outcome to favor the ruling United National Movement (UNM). Many voters took their own pens to vote, due to rumors that the official pens at the ballot stations had disappearing ink. Supporters of the Georgian Dream (GD, Bidzina Ivanishvili’s powerful opposition political movement) allege that they suffered personal reprisals, the most horrific allegation being the murder of a 10 month old baby girl, whose aunt was a member of a GD local coordinating committee. While the latter narrative seems to be false, the fierceness of the accusation and the belief of its political motivation help contextualize the discourse of this election.
Preliminary Outcomes and Concessions
President Saakashvili has conceded the parliamentary election to the Georgian Dream. ISFED, the International Society for Fair Election and Democracy, which maintains a Preliminary Voting Tally reported by its observers (and whose tally is the closest with the still forthcoming Central Election Commission results), indicates a successful outcome for the Georgian Dream, which has taken the majority of the parliamentary seats, winning 55% of the PR vote (to the UNM’s 41%) and many of the majoritarian seats, particularly in the opposition stronghold of Tbilisi. In the provinces, the results indicate a closer competition. Given these outcomes, what lies ahead for Georgian politics?
Many observers will hail this day as a successful one for Georgia’s democratic trajectory, and it is certainly a welcome one, given the difficulties of its neighbors in perusing pluralist governance. Georgia’s democratic path, however, is not secured and liberalism not inevitable. Moreover, the real political narrative in Georgia is based on the real-world policy outcomes as a result of electoral choice. The standard of living in Georgia remain low, poverty and unemployment are high, economic development has waned since the 2008 war and financial crisis, and recent constitutional changes that promise increases in parliamentary power have yet to be tested.
Two Party State?
Preliminary results indicate that only two parties have crossed the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation. The lack of party proliferation, despite the mixed electoral system, is a product of two phenomena. First, the Georgian Dream movement is an amalgamation of several parties within Georgia from across the political spectrum. Personal and ideological chasms divide the united opposition. Ivanishvili himself has not proposed a concrete and consistent policy agenda. He (or his wallet) may continue to be an organizing fulcrum for multiple interests to coincide, but few expect this to happen, given his own expectation that the party would divide. His ability to maintain hold of particularly the majoritarian parliamentarians and maintain a parliamentary majority for key policy issues will be a test of his leadership skills.
Second, we witness with this election the seeming demise of another opposition political party that carved out a policy niche for itself by courting the large Orthodox Christian constituency, the Christian Democratic Union, a party lead by Giorgi Targamadze, one of Georgia’s most savvy politicians. Ivanishvili secured the moral support of the church patriarchate and many believers, in part due to his philanthropy across Georgia in building and restoring churches. No matter where one sits on the ideological spectrum, the replacement of an organic party responsive to popular needs by one whose platform is currently more personalistic than programmatic is a loss for party politics in Georgia.
Finally, although the United National Movement has occasionally been cast as not a true party, a mere staging ground for Saakashvili’s career akin to the Putin-vehicle United Russia, its ideological power should not be dismissed. The UNM has consistently offered a platform with concrete ideas and policy priorities. It has a libertarian ideological bent that is well-grounded in political philosophy. Although previous ruling parties under former president Eduard Shevardnadze often represented an amalgam of disparate personnel and interests and disappeared alongside his power, the UNM has recruited a cadre of political activists and will likely be a real party in opposition.
Saakashvili’s Legacy: Democratic Georgia or a Police State?
Several factors led the voters to reject the UNM message, now nine years after the United National Movement united with opposition groups to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze in the Rose Revolution. Despite early efforts at anti-corruption and infrastructural change, there became a creeping notion that the UNM regime, while emulating a self-styled Western regime, carried within it authoritarian tendencies and held itself outside the law. Nowhere were these concerns so evident than with the public debate of the Interior Ministry and its head, Vano Merabashvili, a high-ranking official of UNM who is now the Prime Minister. These fears rose in a series of incidents, notably the fear that Merabashvili’s allies were involved in the murder of a Georgian youth in 2006, the 2007 violent crackdown on opposition protectors, and most recently, the prison brutality captured on video and aired last month, just weeks before election day. Many observers have interpreted these events as the resurgence of an authoritarian mentality that never truly left the former Soviet and Transcaucasian state.
Yet, this sort of interpretation is a simplistic one, muddied by Saakashvili’s concession speech today. Rather, the strengthening of the judicial and interior forces in Georgia occurred alongside – and were legitimated by – the anti-corruption campaign that established a clean civil service and police force in Georgia at a rapid pace. The Judicial Ministry called it a “zero-sum” policy and, like many overzealous and ambitious projects, it was implemented without the necessary infrastructure and police training. We in the Western states that applauded and financed such policies also share a burden with the Georgian officials who pursued the policies that brought considerable gains but also clear losses and at great societal cost. The lesson is of the value of incrementalism, in political dialogue and institutional development. That the Georgian population chose a leadership in 2004 that would create the institutional procedures that would ultimately contribute to its later electoral failure, as well as political space for it to lose, is a further step of the incremental growth of Georgian pluralism. But it is not a final step.