From massively rigged elections to surges of disinformation on social media, this election season is one to pay attention to — not only in America but also in countries across Europe.
The Republic of Georgia is less than three weeks away from its new parliamentary election, as the country looks to ratify its democracy. The Georgian Parliament, encouraged by Washington D.C., adopted constitutional amendments that changed the structure of the parliament. The amendments made in June guarantee that a variety of opposing parties will be represented in the next legislature. Before then, parliament was elected according to a mixed proportional-majoritarian system that favored the Georgian Dream Coalition, one of the major parties in Georgia.
There are usually two reasons why the Caucasus republic is in news headlines: a war or political instability. Looking back to August 2008, albeit an election year in America, the world’s attention turned to Georgia as Russia invaded the country.
Lincoln Mitchell, a political analyst and associate research scholar, served as the moderator for Columbia University’s Harriman Institute panel discussion on the significance of the Georgian election. Analyzing the pattern of recently elected US presidents, Mitchell sees parallels between the repetition of candidates elected for office in Georgia.
“To some extent, it’s good that they’re not in the news here in the West,” said Lincoln Mitchell. “What I have always told the Georgian leaders is what you want to do is be in the travel section of the news – and that’s Georgia’s self power which they’ve done a pretty good job at. Ten or 15 years ago, people had only heard of Georgia because of war.”
According to Mitchell, the Georgian demographic and ideological coalitions have not changed fundamentally over the years. What changes with each election is the patronage of the candidates. To Mitchell, the personalities of the candidates also seem to play a significant role for voters in Georgia. He sees the same repetitive pattern take place in the US.
“Essentially, every year since 2000 [as in Georgia], we’ve had the same presidential election in the US,” said Mitchell. “If you took the exit polls from Gore-Bush in 2000 and the exit polls from Clinton-Trump in 2016, you wouldn’t know which was which. In other words, it just means that we keep doing the same things.”
Prior to the 2000s, particularly in the ‘90s, Democrats and Republicans still had different opinions on foreign policy and immigration — but the gap between the parties was closing and political agendas started to look strikingly similar. A Pew Research Center study finds that with the rise of Donald Trump, polarization, as in the ‘70s, was reintroduced to US politics. President Nixon’s Southern Strategy of the ‘70s was an initiative to sway white voters over racial fears. President Trump has brought back racial division using remnants of Nixon’s model. He called the Black Lives Matter Movement ‘a symbol of hate’ and refused to denounce white supremacists. Moreover, the Washington Post reports that Trump has become the most polarizing president in US history.
According to Mitchell, polarizing elections weigh heavily on a country’s citizens. When two parties continue to spew the same things they did a decade ago, the country’s voters begin to lose hope for change. During the past decade, Mitchell witnessed, what he called, “very nasty” elections. Georgia has had to face that for the 2012 and 2018 elections, now the question remains of whether this upcoming election will be different.
A November 2019 nationwide poll conducted by the International Republican Institute (IRI) found that 32 percent of Georgians polled did not know who they would vote for if the election happened the next day. The American based non-profit, non-partisan organization found that 23 percent of people would vote for the two main parties: the United National Movement (UNM) and the Georgian Dream Coalition (GDC).
UNM’s candidate is the former President of Georgia Mikheil (Misha) Saakashvili who was in charge for a decade before losing to Giorgi Margvelashvili in October 2013. Margvelashvili, a member of the GDC, is an ally of the former Georgian Prime Minister and founder of Georgian Dream Bidzina Ivanishvili (B.I.).
Anna Dolidze, a Georgian politician who spoke on the Harriman Institute panel, reflected on the reasons why the two largest parties lack majority support. Dolidze sees the GDC’s campaign as lacking in actual form, only existing in namesake.
The party’s speeches show that they combat the UNM rather than showing how they can help Georgia – something Georgians have already seen. Besides rising concerns about the legitimacy of GDC’s win in 2016, Georgians also question how effective another GDC win would be. Four years later, Bidzina argued the goals, or lack thereof, within the party campaign.
“Bidzina spent 40 minutes of his party presentation speech speaking about UNM, so the only content of GDC is not letting UNM back,” said Dolidze. “Most people work or have someone that works in the government offices. It’s going to be about bargaining for jobs, or sorting the lost jobs, or maybe more petty bribery like small favors in regions. I think the problem we have is that it is not that GDC can’t lose but it’s that there is nobody there ready who can win these elections.”
Mitchell dubbed the past Georgian elections as ‘Seinfeld Elections’ in which no one really knew what the goals of the candidates were because they agreed on the basics.
“Seinfeld was famously a television show about nothing and if you have an election about nothing, then what is it about?” Mitchell said. “In the USA, when you go to the polls, you want to be thinking that what the government should do now is not spend any more money and make it easier for wealthy people to make money because that will fix the economy. ”
Mitchell says this is one of many thoughts Americans could have on fixing the economy. What really matters is that it can be answered in completely different ways. He says that in politics, the debate is the vision to get there, as seen with the views on the US economy. The two major parties have not offered clear visions to fix their economy. Those lines between both parties become blurred in Georgia with these kinds of debates not happening.
The Harriman’s Institute panel on Georgia concluded with each speaker giving their position on the election. Michael Cecire, a scholar from the Middle East Institute, said that America should get its own ideals in order first. Cecire did not see the progress of democracy in Georgia coming yet.
In an interview over Zoom, Mitchell disagreed.
“I’m not saying 300 million Americans need to be paying attention to a country,” Mitchel said.
To Mitchell, US Mitchell’s issue was that foreign policy makers do not truly represent the intentions of all Americans. The public needs to know what these decisions are and have a say in who makes them, “There needs to be some institutional capacity that when things happen, people need to know about them. Too frequently, we defer knowledge about foreign policy in America to experts who skew whiter, more male and more conservative than the American population.”
Harping back to what happened in Georgia in 2008, it is hard to know the significance of something until it happens. Mitchell is not urging every single American to know about the situation in Georgia, but a general awareness would be helpful. He referenced how the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has become a prominent news headline in western media because of the war. Such situations could be prevented if people in other countries were more aware.
And in Georgia’s case, according to Mitchell, people have not yet been made aware of just how pivotal this election might prove to be.
“What the uniformed American news needs to know about the Georgian elections is that if things go well in Georgia, this election will break them out of a cycle, “ said Mitchell. “It’s a cycle of regime consolidation and collapse, towards a more stable democracy, that’ll be one less country in the world that they need to worry about.”
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