Labour Hub interviewed Georgian journalist Giorgi Chagelishvili about what lies behind the recent protests in his country.

Q: Earlier this year an estimated 200,000 people protested against the Georgian Government’s Proposed Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence. Why were the protests so big and what kind of people took part?

A: First, we have to start in 2023, from the moment when the Georgian Government brought up the Proposal for the first time when it bore a different name, the Foreign Agents Law. So almost from nowhere, at least for the general public, the Georgian Dream party labelled all kinds of non-profit organizations who took foreign donations (not less than 20 percent of their yearly budget) as Foreign Agents. In post-Soviet society ‘agent’ is a synonym for ‘spy’. So first of all, besides the questionable regulations that it meant to place on the table, the project had a political inclination aimed at discrediting every kind of social organization that was free of local party and business structures.

In Georgia most donations come from the West, from EU and US funds, and even from Georgian émigrés, through crowdfunding. The Proposal was seen as a blow, the start of a geopolitical shift away from the Western course, from a discursive destination that was seen as only salvation for the whole nation after the Republic got its independence from the USSR. From the first days of parliamentary debate, the Proposal was granted its second name, the Russian Law.

In 2023, due to the reactions it provoked in the form of a wave of protests, especially in the capital of the country, Tbilisi, the Proposal was cancelled. The Government promised it would drop the topic permanently.

Those were some of the reasons why the law, even with its softened title (but with exactly the same contents) caused a new wave of disturbances in 2024.

The protests were mostly concentrated in Tbilisi. NGOs and the opposition were leading them, but participation was broader, and included those who distanced their general positions from both, yet were linked to being pro-western.

2024 was an election year and despite the scale of the opposition to the second attempt, the Government had to be more decisive with its steps. So it passed.

After the aforementioned Proposal became law, the pre-election environment got tense and polarization deepened. The Government campaigned on the promise of putting an end to all kinds of opposition who were marked as agents of the ‘Global Party Of War’, in the event that it got a constitutional majority in parliament.

Q: Were these the same people who protested against this October’s general election results? What are the different social forces involved on each side of this divide?

A: Despite the problematic outcome of October’s general election, none of the mainstream parties enjoy trust and strong popular support. The opposition was unable to mobilize big protests in the streets. Despite that, polarization in the rhetoric of local political forces and the pressure on the government from outside were growing. Talk about rigged elections and upcoming sanctions from the West was becoming more and more intense.

A new wave of protests came after 28^th November, when Irakli Kobakhidze, the Prime Minister and leader of the Georgian Dream party, announced they would not pursue the opening of EU membership negotiations until 2028. This was received as another clear step in the geopolitical turn.

The next day, clashes with the police started in front of Parliament. This time the protests involved more sections of society and even spread to the regions. Opposition parties and big NGOs stepped back behind the curtain from the riots, and it was mostly young people with mixed political views, from left to right, who took up the fight with law enforcement.

Outside of the political parties and donor-funded NGOs, Georgia lacks strong organizing forces. The biggest trade union is yellow and the rest are not strong enough to mobilize significant numbers of the working class. On top of that, Georgia lacks even a centre-left party we could call labour-oriented. All of that makes it impossible to define workers as a clearly distinct subject in action. Despite the lack of organization, the masses that came onto the streets were of course students, workers or middle class. Almost all of the leftist groups stood on the side of the protests.

Q: With a new president chosen and the outgoing president refusing to stand down, how can the political crisis be resolved – or will it just result in further social polarization?

A: There are too many hidden angles in the multipolarity of the ongoing events. Resolving the question lies in the hands of the politicians. As I see it, the Government has more grounds for stepping back, by opening negotiations and proposing at least some concessions.

Right now Georgia is moving between right wing authoritarianism and civil strife. The economic crisis and the growing involvement of geopolitical forces could make things worse.
 

Q: How significant are progressive political forces in Georgia and what are they calling for?  

A: Left wing politics have been marginal since the collapse of the USSR. The country went through shock therapy after the 1990s and the so-called Rose Revolution brought even more neoliberal politics. Labour codes were nullified; unionization decreased tenfold.

Opposition to the past Government of the National Movement included newly-reborn left student groups. Changes in 2012 brought some small civil freedoms and labour rights.

The left has been growing since, finding itself in labour and environmental movements, making media, developing cultural spaces and autonomous trade unions. The movement in general has been spreading its ideas among young people and trying to find points of reconnection with workers and people of the older generation that had to go through the shock therapy and right wing anti-labour propaganda.

Q: There are some on the left in the West who see the upsurge in Georgia as another US-orchestrated ‘colour revolution’. How would you respond to this?

As we see it in Georgia, the country is one of the central regions of current multipolar confrontation. Especially after the Ukraine war, its geopolitical price has risen due to its place in potential trade routes between east and west.

The US is definitely involved, and has been supporting oppositional parties openly, supporting NGOs, threatening the Government with sanctions. But it is not only the US. The interests of capital are involved and vocal from all sides, like Russia, Ukraine, France, Hungary, Germany, Azerbaijan and even the Baltic states. All of those have their own interests.

In general, the public lacks a full picture of what lies behind the political curtain. But alongside geopolitical threats, a lot of us are concerned about the prospect of right-wing authoritarianism. This is being pushed by big local capital that is still trying to break the organizational structures the rest of society managed to create during the last twelve years, whether they were funded by western funds or purely by ordinary Georgians.

The lack of a nationwide leftist organization in the face of the interests of capital from all sides makes our state more precarious then we would like to hope.

Image: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2024_Georgian_Protests,_May_2_b.jpg
Photo from the 2024 protests against the “Russian law” aka the “foreign agents” bill. Author: Zlad!, licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.