In the winding streets of old Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, one has the feeling of being constantly under his watchful eye. From his hilltop glass mansion, which critics liken to the lair of a James Bond villain, Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest and most influential man, guided for more than a decade the process of moving the country away from the Caucasus. West.
With his party’s latest victory in last Saturday’s crucial parliamentary elections, this trajectory looks set to continue for years to come. Opposition parties have already warned of the danger of Ivanishvili dismantling Georgia’s fragile three-decade democratic experiment, while blocking any viable process towards European integration.
Since his brief tenure as prime minister between 2012 and 2013, the secretive oligarch, whose wealth is estimated at $7.5 billion in a country with a GDP of $30 billion, has largely exercised his influence behind the scenes and has been widely appreciated by many Georgians. They describe him as the “puppeteer” of the country.
On Saturday evening, Ivanishvili smiled in public at his party headquarters as the country’s election commission announced that the ruling Georgian Dream (SG) party he founded had won 54 percent of the vote, a result that would secure him power for another four years.
After the oligarch’s speech, fireworks lit up the sky and their loud booms echoed throughout the city, reflecting the despair of an opposition whose hopes of forming a pro-Western coalition had faded.
Ivanishvili spent much of the 1990s in Russia, where he founded banking, metals, real estate and telecommunications companies and became wealthy in the chaotic period following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When he returned to Georgia and entered politics, he chose to cultivate an air of mystery. His extravagant hobbies, including breeding sharks and zebras and collecting rare trees, attracted public attention, and stories about his lavish pastimes became popular anecdotes throughout the country. “I could tell you anything I wanted and you couldn’t prove whether it was true or false,” he once said in an unusual interview.
Transphobic and illiberal rhetoric
Ivanishvili has played a more visible role in the lead-up to Saturday’s election, seen as a decisive vote that could determine whether Georgia shifts away from its Western trend and strengthens ties with the Kremlin.
The oligarch’s public reappearance coincided with a sharp escalation of his party’s anti-liberal and anti-Western discourse. In a recent interview, laden with transphobic and homophobic rhetoric reminiscent of far-right forums on the Internet, Ivanishvili described Georgia as a country immersed in a cultural struggle against the West, which he accuses of trying to impose values corrosive in the country. . He claimed that in Europe, parents pressure their children to undergo reassignment operations and that “man’s milk” for babies is considered “the same as woman’s milk.”
Ivanishvili advised those who doubted his claims to watch footage of a Pride event in Barcelona, saying it included young children and “all kinds of orgies”.
He also structured his party’s election campaign around accusations that the West, alongside the country’s opposition, was trying to drag Georgia into a conflict like Ukraine, a powerful message in a country where many fear war with Russia since Putin’s troops were briefly invaded. the country in August 2008.
Ivanishvili’s critics and those who have worked with him in the past warn that behind his bombastic rhetoric lies real danger. In this sense, they highlight their promises to ban main opposition parties and fire opposition lawmakers after the elections, calling them “criminals” and “traitors.”
“It’s very simple, Ivanishvili keeps his promises. He promised to outlaw and imprison his opponents and I have no reason to doubt that he will attempt to do so,” says Tina Khidasheli, who served as defense minister in a government led by the SG between 2015 and 2016 and has since become critical of Ivanishvili.
As the oligarch’s rhetoric has hardened, so has his paranoia. If he previously felt comfortable among large crowds, Ivanishvili now travels with a wide security cordon and delivers his speeches behind armored glass.
“For Ivanishvili, staying in power is an existential question of survival,” says Kornely Kakachia, director of the Georgian Institute of Politics: “He believes that if he loses, his opponents will attack not only his political power, but also to its power. affairs of empire.
A Kremlin puppet?
Opposition parties have long accused Ivanishvili of loyalty to Moscow, pointing to the Russian origin of his wealth.
Under his leadership, Georgia enacted a “foreign agents” law targeting Western-funded NGOs, as well as legislation against the LGBTI community. Both measures bear notable similarities to laws approved by the Kremlin years ago.
However, some experienced analysts warn against oversimplifying the speech as a mere puppet of Putin. “It appeases Russia, but I see no reason to suggest that this is controlled or due to Russia, and that is an important distinction,” says Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and an expert on the region.
In contrast, de Waal says Ivanishvili’s tactics resemble those of Viktor Orbán, the divisive Hungarian leader. De Waal notes that Orbán and Ivinishavili focused their campaigns on conservative “Christian” values, while calling for “peace” in Ukraine without condemning Russia. In fact, it is telling that Orbán was the first foreign leader to congratulate the Georgian Dream on its “landslide victory,” hours before the official results were announced.
What happens is uncertain
For now, Georgia’s immediate future remains uncertain. On Sunday morning, the opposition refused to acknowledge defeat, accusing the ruling party of staging a “constitutional coup” and calling for protests. This sets the stage for a possible political crisis in a country with a history of mass unrest.
There is no doubt that Ivanishvili took advantage of his seemingly unlimited financial power to influence the elections, which were marred by accusations of irregularities, including allegations of electoral coercion of state officials and cases vote buying.
Still, the result suggests that Ivanishvili’s messages are resonating with a core of voters, particularly in the industrial heartland and in poorer, more conservative regions, where economic progress has been slow and where the attraction of being part of Europe seems distant and weak.
“It is tempting for the opposition to claim that Ivanishvili’s party does not have the support of citizens who bought the elections,” says a Western source in Tbilisi: “But the reality is that, for now, Ivanishvili seems to have won. the battle.”
Translation by Emma Reverter.
