Georgian Dream, the ruling party of the Republic of Georgia, is trying, unashamedly, to turn the country into a one-party state. With national elections on October 26, the party, which is controlled and financed by the pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, is trying to drive underground, out of business, or into exile the civic, academic, watchdog, and election-monitoring groups that support closer ties to the West and are fighting Georgia’s capture by Russia.

The democratic opposition has been begging the U.S. and the EU to use their bully pulpits and sanctions to undermine the effort. In an act of foreign policy malpractice, their response has been tepid and belated.

 In late August, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced that the government would, if Georgian Dream retained a working majority within parliament, begin banning pro-Western opposition parties. Because there are serious doubts that a fair election will even be held (with the party firmly in control of the Central Election Commission), Georgia could well be headed toward becoming a second Belarus. 

This would be a serious and needless loss to the West. The overwhelming majority of Georgians sees themselves as Europeans whose home is within the European Union, while two-thirds fully support joining NATO. They are a threat to Vladimir Putin’s dream of reestablishing Russian domination of the former Soviet Union. Like the Baltic republics, a democratic Georgia that freely rejects Moscow’s dominion serves as an icon for how a formerly Soviet people can become more humane and prosperous. Stunningly beautiful and wine-rich, stubbornly Christian but religiously tolerant, and sandwiched between Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, and the Black Sea, Georgia has historically had an outsized influence on the region.

Ivanishvili, founder of Georgia Dream, its de facto leader, and a former prime minister, clearly sees the stakes. For years, Georgian Dream has been pushing Georgia toward Russia. In June 2019, the government allowed a visiting member of the Russian Duma who had supported the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 to address the parliament from the speakers’ podium. Rather than see the Kremlin as the aggressor here, Ivanishvili and his minions have increasingly shown sympathy to a war that became a blatant Russian land grab along the Black Sea. In 2021, for example, the Georgian Dream-led government allowed the U.S. training program for Georgia’s military to die. And instead of helping to isolate Russia in the wake of the Ukraine invasion, Georgia’s government has thrown open its doors to Russian money and increased sanctions-busting, cross-border trade, while at the same time killing infrastructure projects that would have lessened Russian control over regional trade between Central Asia and Europe. A senior U.S. official recently told Voice of America’s Georgian service that Ivanishvili has undertaken “some actions at the direction of the Russian intelligence services.” 

Responding to the Georgian population’s hopes, Ivanishvili and his party had at least in the past “professed” a desire to see the country join the EU. However, in December 2023, once Brussels gave Georgia “candidate status”—conditioning acceptance on the government allowing an independent media and cleaning up the corruption and abuses that had become endemic under Georgian Dream—the faux rhetoric ended and the gloves came off. It’s also probable that Putin saw Georgia’s actual candidate status as simply unacceptable and ordered Ivanishvili to put an end to the charade. Ivanishvili, who made his billions while living in Russia and who still probably makes vast sums from laundering Russian money through Georgian banks, hasn’t as yet been sanctioned by either Washington or Brussels despite the democratic opposition begging for such action. 

Concerned Georgians are trying to stop the country’s authoritarian drift. Tens upon tens of thousands of them repeatedly hit the streets of Tbilisi this past spring to protest Georgia Dream’s effort to enact a foreign-agent law—the first big step toward dictatorship. The party rammed the legislation past a presidential veto. The law requires non-governmental organizations that receive 20 percent or more of their funding from outside Georgia to register with the government as “pursuing the interest of a foreign power.” Copied from a Russian law instituted in 2012, its goal is to force Western-assisted, civic organizations to declare themselves as foreign agents.

These organizations overwhelmingly promote liberal and democratic norms. They are working on behalf of Georgian citizens, not foreign governments. The law has exactly the opposite purpose of, say, the U.S.’s Foreign Agent Registration Act.  Since most NGOs will not register as “foreign agents,” and few have the resources to pay the fines, it’s likely they will cease operating.

It’s regrettable that some American conservatives have tried to depict Georgian Dream and the foreign-agents law as a reasonable response to supposed American meddling in Georgia’s domestic affairs. Elements within Georgian Dream, likely following Putin’s and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán’s efforts to depict themselves as avatars of traditional values, have tried to depict Ivanishvili’s naked power grab as a populist upwelling against imported indecency.  

Anyone who has actually visited the targeted NGOs or met the principal players in the Georgian opposition knows, however, that they aren’t trying to turn the country into a LGBT haven; they are just trying to ensure the country maintains basic civil liberties and a free press and that the government isn’t captured by a pro-Russian mafia.  

The writing has been on the wall for the last several years when it comes to the direction Ivanishvili and his minions wanted to take Georgia in. But neither Washington nor Brussels developed policies to challenge that effort. Instead, both opted for continued engagement, hoping the worst would not occur. 

Over the past two years, up to today, Georgians have taken to the streets in massive numbers to protest the government’s turn from the West and toward Moscow. Yet the EU is still largely sitting on its hands, freezing some aid but not all and suggesting, but with no guarantee, that there might be sanctions on the Georgian Dream’s leaders following this month’s elections. Congress, meanwhile, has yet to move legislation adopted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to a vote that would offer a comprehensive carrot-and-sticks approach to Georgia. And only within recent weeks has the Biden administration suspended $95 million in aid and let it be known that it had prepared a package of sanctions against Ivanishvili for undermining Georgia’s democracy and acting to the benefit of the Kremlin—steps the democratic opposition welcomes but wanted to see being put forward months earlier when the foreign-agent law was being passed, when civil society leaders were being threatened, and when police and pro-government thugs were beating up individuals peacefully protesting in the streets. 

Putin, of course, has had his eye on Georgia, Stalin’s birthplace, for years now. Calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest tragedy of the 20^th century, he kept troops in Georgia after the republic declared independence. And when, at the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, the alliance declared that Georgia would not be offered a roadmap to join the alliance, but would at some point in the very distant future possibly be offered membership, he invaded just four months later. Now, with Ivanishvili controlling all the levers of power in Georgia, Putin doesn’t have to invade to capture Georgia. 

The vast majority of Georgians are pro-Western democrats. It’s a tragedy that the West has not done better by them.