Streets on fire: Is Georgia opposition forming up a coup?

Events have taken an astonishing turn in the Republic of Georgia. On Thursday, newly re-appointed Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that Georgia would not “put the issue of opening negotiations with the European Union on the agenda until the end of 2028,” and not accept budget support from the EU until then, either.

In the three-decade history of EU enlargement into Eastern Europe and Eurasia, where the promise of membership and the capricious integration process have roiled societies, felled governments, raised and dashed hopes like no other political variable, this is unheard of. So is the treatment Georgia has received at the hands of the West.

Kobakhidze’s announcement triggered the latest flare-up of a chronic crisis described in a recent brief for the Quincy Institute. Its origins lie in the “geopolitization” of Georgia’s domestic political arrangement. Although both the government and opposition have long pursued robust integration with the West, key Western leaders nevertheless favored the current opposition and tried to limit or indeed end the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party’s hold on power.

The resulting alienation between the Georgian government and the West was exacerbated when, after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Georgia came under intense pressure to join Western sanctions and give much of its heavy weaponry to Ukraine. Fearing for their small, vulnerable country’s security and economic survival, GD declined.

GD has resisted what it views as slow-motion regime change, for example by passing controversial measures this year that would oblige foreign-funded NGOs to disclose their financial records. Those steps further widened the gulf between GD and the West, triggering large-scale protests by pro-EU Georgians in 2023 and 2024. The most recent crest of protests, coming after GD declared victory in an election that the opposition claims (but has been unable to prove) was marred by fraud, had only just petered out days ago.

Within hours of Kobakhidze’s announcement, crowds gathered for protests in Tbilisi and other cities, conspicuously angrier and more violent than usual, drawing a greater  crackdown from the police as well. Georgia’s human rights ombudsmen have criticized not only the police violence against individuals but, critically, their attempts to disperse the entire protest.

Pro-opposition president Salome Zourabichvili, whose term in office expires this month, has declared she intends to remain in office and gather opposition forces in a council to prepare for taking power from a government she denounced as illegitimate. Several Georgian ambassadors have resigned, while hundreds of staff at government agencies have signed letters of protest. A former minister has called for the army to defend the people. This latest flare up of Georgia’s chronic crisis already feels more seismic than previous ones.

EU accession is an arcane process, so it’s important to clarify what actually happened and what didn’t. After eight years as an EU associated country (a sort of half-way house for Europe’s periphery), during which GD adopted a raft of EU regulations at a faster clip than its peers, Georgia was allowed to apply for full EU-membership in March 2022.

The EU presented a list of broadly formulated “priorities” —conditions Georgia had to fulfill to obtain candidate status. There were poison pills in the small print: GD would have to share power with the opposition, let EU-appointed foreign experts vet senior judicial appointments, allow NGOs agitating to get the government sanctioned and deposed to participate in law- and policy-making, and more. Another priority — “de-oligarchization” — turned out to violate the EU’s own civil rights norms. After an unresolved tug of war over these priorities, Georgia was granted candidate status in December 2023.

In recent years, EU accession has morphed from a technocratic-managerial process into an extended obstacle course, in which at every stage arbitrary new demands may be introduced. Georgia may have won candidate status, but accession “negotiations” (a misnomer for supervised adoption of the EU’s entire body of law) do not follow automatically. The government must still accept those same old priorities that GD considers incompatible with the country’s sovereignty.

On top of that, the EU declared in June and again after the elections in October that it was “halting” Georgia’s accession indefinitely, citing Georgia’s laws on foreign funding for NGOs and on the “protection of family values and minors” as reasons. And that it would cancel €121 million of budget support. So even before PM Kobakhidze’s shock move, Georgia was in an accession purgatory unprecedented in EU enlargement history.

A different — factually correct — perspective holds that this is all hot air: since the EU had already halted Georgia’s accession process and withheld budget support, Kobakhidze’s announcement is the equivalent of “you can’t fire me, I quit!” Except that no one is being fired, no one is quitting, Georgia has not withdrawn from the accession process and remains a candidate for EU membership.

Kobakhidze took great care to affirm that Georgia would continue to adopt reforms already agreed with the EU. The next day, he walked things back even further, saying that if the EU offered to launch accession negotiations, he would sign the same day.

Even so, it is hard not to read this decision by the Georgian government as an act of defiance, as calling the EU’s bluff. It turns the tables on a relationship in which the EU normally holds all the cards. The Georgian government’s halting of EU accession may be a symbolic act without material consequences, but symbolism matters greatly in the relations between the West and countries like Georgia.

Kobakhidze described Georgia’s predicament as being “blackmailed” by the EU: making the start of accession negotiations and budget support contingent on Georgia’s relinquishing essential elements of its sovereignty. As if to illustrate his point, that same day the European Parliament adopted its latest resolution on Georgia, calling for a re-run of the election with monitoring led not by the OSCE but the EU, as well as sanctioning and asset-freezing of a long list of Georgian officials and judges.

The European Parliament’s new standing rapporteur on Georgia went further still, demanding new elections organized by the international community, reminiscent of occupied Afghanistan or Iraq.

In contrast, the EU’s new High Representative for Foreign Policy together with the Commissioner for Enlargement released a carefully worded statement, avoiding judgment on the election and emphasizing that the door remains open for EU talks. Meanwhile, the State Department suspended the U.S.-Georgia Strategic Partnership, following earlier threats.

These developments come at a time when the EU’s enlargement model feels at the end of its tether. While the EU has embarked on a militarization that is prohibited by its foundational treaties, enlargement has turned into a zero-sum geopolitical endeavor. Piecemeal integration into the EU’s one-size-fits-all economic model has not delivered the prosperity and social justice that Georgians have hoped for, a problem highlighted even by institutions strongly supportive of Georgia’s EU accession.

One regional analyst characterized Georgia’s actions as “geopolitical backsliding.” That might have been a Freudian slip. Or it might have been in earnest, normalizing the conflation of geopolitics with democracy that defines the West’s approach to Europe’s periphery.

This approach — demanding ever-greater inroads into sovereign politics and governance, asking vulnerable countries the impossible, arm-twisting and worse — will not restore the constructive partnership we once had with Georgia and continue to fan the country’s crisis.