Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
26-10-2024
TBILISI: Georgians know all about Russia’s wars. Several years before Russia invaded Ukraine, its army launched a five-day war in August 2008. The city of Gori was bombed and occupied, and a fierce battle further north in Shindisi left the station destroyed and the railway abandoned.
So when the country’s four opposition groups label Saturday’s pivotal election as a choice between Russia and Europe, their aim is to end 12 years of rule by the governing Georgian Dream party, who they accuse of drifting back into Russia’s orbit.
They want to revive Georgia’s stalled bid to join the European Union.
“In these streets we had Russians,” says Mindia Goderdzishvili, running the campaign in Gori for opposition group Coalition for Change. “People here have this in their memories and the government uses this in a bad way, playing on their emotions because they want to stay in power.”
Georgian Dream, known as GD, and its powerful billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili vehemently reject the opposition’s framing of the vote as a choice between Russia and Europe.
Theirs is the party of peace, they argue, while the opposition, backed by an unidentified “global war party” wants to drag Georgia into war.
A short distance from the bombed out station in Shindisi lie the graves of 17 Georgian soldiers who died defending the town. The separation line is not far north from here and beyond it is South Ossetia, one of two breakaway Georgian regions still under Russian military occupation.
“I don’t think anybody can guarantee Georgia’s security today,” says Maka Bochorishvili, the head of Georgia’s EU integration committee tells the BBC at Georgian Dream’s new headquarters in Tbilisi.
“We are not members of Nato, we don’t have that umbrella over our head. The last war of 2008 was not long ago.”
Her party still promises to take former Soviet republic Georgia into the European Union by 2030, but that commitment seems hollow when the EU has put the process on hold because of a law targeting “foreign influence” that threatens countless media and non-government groups.
Add to that a recent law targeting LGBT rights in Georgia and local reports of intimidation of voters, and it is no surprise that EU ambassador Pawel Herczynski feels that “instead of getting closer, Georgia is moving away from the European Union”. On Thursday, financial police raided the homes of two Tbilisi-based women who are part of a research arm of the US-based Atlantic Council think tank. The prime minister suggested the searches “might uncover something interesting”.
Pro-Western president Salome Zourabichvili has openly called on Georgians to support opposition groups, who have backed her plan for a one-year technocratic government if they win.
Much of the spotlight in this election has focused on Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgia’s richest man who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s and is considered the guiding force behind the ruling party.
Ivanishvili has gone into Saturday’s election promising to ban the biggest opposition party, the United National Movement, because of what it did before GD came to power.
UNM’s former leader, Mikheil Saakashvili is locked up in jail, but GD wants to go after other opposition figures too, so the ban could extend far beyond one party. For that to happen, they would need to win a big majority. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
