Defending Democracy in Georgia

Summary

Georgia has been driven into the grey zone between formal democracy and authoritarian consolidation by its ruling party. Society’s capacity for resistance has proved durable, though. Georgian Dream has enacted repressive legislation, beginning with the 2024 Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence and culminating in the 2026 criminalization of the receipt of any foreign funding without prior state approval. Civil society organizations (CSOs) face criminal liability for accepting foreign support, opposition parties face judicial bans, independent media face funding prohibitions, and protesters face felony charges. The party has also dismantled, captured, or neutralized the safeguarding institutions of democracy. Its authoritarian consolidation rests on four pillars of control: institutional capture, narrative manipulation, coercive legalism and economic capture. Georgian Dream has moved from labeling to licensing to criminalizing CSOs, the aim being to eradicate them and to replace them with compliant substitutes. CSOs, independent media, and the protest movement that began after the 2024 elections have been the primary targets of repression as they are the only remaining counterweight to Georgian Dream.

Civil society has responded with unprecedented resilience, including through the longest continuous daily protests in Georgia’s modern history, mass refusal to register under the “foreign agents” legislation, the country’s first nationwide strike, and coordinated litigation before the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights. International actors have imposed targeted sanctions, suspended assistance to the state, and invoked the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism, yet their leverage has been blunted by vetoes within the EU, failures of coordination, and Georgian Dream’s willingness to absorb the economic costs.

There have been shortcomings in civil society’s response, however: advocacy framed in terms that Georgian Dream can exploit through identity politics; near-total dependence on foreign funding, which has left the sector financially brittle; failure to contest the information space among audiences sympathetic to Georgian Dream; and legal contestation pursued reactively rather than strategically. Civil society must shift from a protest mentality to a construction mentality, aiming to build the institutions, capacities, and parallel infrastructure on which democratic recovery will depend. It should organize on the understanding that Georgian Dream seeks to eradicate it. It should shift the contest from identity politics to people’s material concerns, and build domestic constituencies and durable funding bases rather than rely on external support. Strategic litigation and the pre-bunking of regime narratives should be central tactics rather than last resorts, and the information space should be treated as a front in its own right. Above all, civil society should invest in the people who will build the parallel civic infrastructure needed for democratic recovery by supporting the conversion of the skills of street mobilization into those of institution-building.

The EU and other international actors should restructure their conditionality toward Georgia’s government around verifiable benchmarks and with automatic consequences, and provide sustained institutional funding to civil society and independent media instead of short-term, project-based support. They should invest in building a practical resilience infrastructure abroad for civil society, make full use of the channels that remain open inside the country (not least academic cooperation), and refuse cooperation with politically motivated international legal proceedings brought under money-laundering and counter-terrorism instruments. Regional and international coordination among civil society actors should be systematized to enable mutual learning, solidarity, and collective advocacy.

George Melashvili is a ReThink.CEE Fellow 2025 of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF).

The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.