Year XXXIX, Number 1, March 2026

Lorenzo Ricci

Independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. Author of the newsletter Pillole di Vetro and of the documentary “Georgia 2025: How a Democracy Dies” (2026).

In my last days in Tbilisi, Georgia, where I was based until December 22, 2025 to produce a documentary on the country’s ongoing democratic crisis, I had the opportunity to interview Professor Sergi Kapanadze. Together we reconstructed the anti democratic path followed so far by the ruling party, Georgian Dream, as it has worked to erode Georgia’s institutional order. Kapanadze speaks as a political observer, but also as a man of institutions. He served as Deputy Foreign Minister until 2012, and later sat in Parliament in the opposition from 2016 to 2020, as the opposition’s Deputy Speaker. Today he is the founder and director of the GRASS think tank. From this insider, and disillusioned, perspective, he retraces the trajectory that, in his view, has brought the country close to a point of no return. Kapanadze does not mince words. Georgia, he argues, is sliding toward a single party dictatorship. What makes this diagnosis even more alarming is the underlying paradox. According to public opinion surveys cited by Kapanadze himself, between 70 and 80 percent of Georgians continue to hold a European identity and pro EU aspirations. And yet, how can one account for the growing disjunction between popular sovereignty and the political will of the governing elite?

The rise of georgian dream and opportunistic europeanness

Georgian Dream came to power in 2012, led by its founder and undisputed leader, the Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. Ivanishvili presented himself as a liberal oriented toward Brussels, a convincing face promising Georgia a future of reforms and progress. For Kapanadze, however, Georgian Dream’s pro Europeanism was often a predatory, short term oriented Europeanness. It was opportunistic Europeanism tied to tangible electoral gains, such as trade agreements and Schengen visa liberalization, more than to the deep democratic structural reforms required to meet the standards for European integration. In the period from 2012 to 2021, while Georgian Dream waved the European flag from Lisbon to Kraków, enlargement toward Tbilisi was not a concrete item on the European Commission’s agenda, particularly under the Juncker Commission. In essence, Georgian Dream could present itself as pro European at a time when there was still no real window of opportunity to join the EU.

The 2022 turning point

The turning point emerged when EU accession became a realistic goal and the Union accelerated the integration process. In 2022, Brussels began demanding radical institutional reforms. At this stage, Kapanadze confirms, the government not only decelerated the reform process but actively obstructed the implementation of EU conditionality, in order to avoid destabilizing the consolidating oligarchic power structure. One example was the first attempt to introduce the so-called Russian laws, especially the law on foreign agents, proposed in 2023 and ratified in 2024, despite massive street protests. This is a coercive legal instrument modeled on the authoritarian regulatory frameworks introduced by Putin’s Russia and Lukashenko’s Belarus, and is designed to financially marginalize and delegitimize actors engaged in the promotion of pluralistic information ecosystems and liberal-democratic processes. According to this reading, Georgian Dream’s objective in 2023 was to prepare the ground for reforms that would soon be demanded, crushing free information and internal dissent, and sending a signal typical of a democracy beginning to transform into an illiberal system. And yet, Kapanadze notes, Georgia still obtained EU candidate status. Not as a result of governmental compliance or reformist credentials, he argues, but rather due to geopolitical calculations and, above all, the sustained pro-EU mobilization of Georgian civil society.

How a pro eu majority is neutralized

Kapanadze identifies two main tools through which power is neutralizing a society that remains largely pro European: police violence and propaganda. Georgian Dream’s approach, he declares, does not aim to turn pro Europeans into anti Europeans. Rather, it seeks to dilute that social bloc, pushing one part toward conformity with conservative, Christian Orthodox norms, in opposition to the civil, center left progressivism of European countries, while discouraging the progressive component from actively participating in Georgia’s political life through repression. Those who attend demonstrations have a high likelihood of identification through one of the extensive facial recognition systems deployed across the urban space, coupled with the risk of arbitrary detention or coercive practices by riot police units. If someone also works in the public sector, the possibility of being fired, or seeing their career prospects immediately wiped out, becomes very real. The second element is the more classic combination of oppression and propaganda. Pressure, intimidation, and the relentless narratives of state television, amid the absence of an effective media counterweight, push citizens, especially older people and residents of rural areas, to underestimate the seriousness of the authoritarian drift.

Fear of war as a political lever

A third element fits into this reasoning: the fear of war. With the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, the hypothesis of a Russian invasion as retaliation for Georgia moving too close to the Union has become more credible, especially in the country’s interior regions. Georgia still carries the trauma of the 2008 Russian aggression, when it formally lost control over about 20 percent of its territory in the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It is easy to exploit this trauma to discourage mobilization and feed the idea that stability, even at the cost of freedom and pluralism, is the only rational choice.

The erosion of democratic safeguards

Georgian Dream’s authoritarian drift, according to Kapanadze, did not emerge overnight. A decisive phase, he declares, was the period from 2016 to 2021, when Ivanishvili’s party promoted a new constitutional architecture and a series of institutional reforms capable of progressively weakening checks and balances and steering the system toward an oligarchic model. The process was not completed through a single dramatic provision, but through a series of interventions that reduced the weight of guarantor bodies: a less incisive presidency, a judiciary more exposed to political pressure, and the gradual hollowing out of independent institutions, such as the ombudsman and other oversight bodies. The result, he argues, is an increasingly unbalanced system in which political competition still formally exists, but spaces for pluralism and oversight are progressively emptied of real effectiveness.

A red thread between Moscow and Tbilisi

On relations with Moscow, Kapanadze deliberately avoids the definition of a proxy party when referring to Georgian Dream, in order not to fuel speculation. He says he cannot prove direct control, no instruction in an envelope, no evidence that the party is directly controlled by the FSB. But he adds what he considers an unequivocal political fact: look at the facts, they are serving Russian national interests. To argue this, he lists choices and behaviors: saying no to NATO, saying no to the Union, importing laws and authoritarian practices reminiscent of Russian governance, relying on propaganda and disinformation, and intensifying vote buying through the weaponization of poverty. Whether it is a proxy party or not, he observes, if one looks at domestic reforms and Georgia’s international conduct under Georgian Dream over the last ten years, it is striking how this set of actions aligns with the needs of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Brussels’ responsibilities Kapanadze does not spare criticism of Brussels either. In his view, the Union sinned by being naïve. It underestimated the emerging dictatorship and gave the government too much credit, hoping the drift would not be completed. Hope, he says, is the worst strategy. In this sense, the 2021 mediation promoted under the leadership of Charles Michel is an emblematic example. It was launched to unblock the political crisis following the 2020 elections, when part of the opposition boycotted Parliament alleging fraud. The Union managed to secure the signing of an agreement, A way ahead for Georgia, which provided for judicial and electoral reforms, depolarization measures, and a clause linked to the outcome of the 2021 local elections. According to Kapanadze, however, it was mediation with bare hands. The agreement relied mainly on the Union’s political weight, without credible pressure tools or incentives capable of ensuring implementation. When the government pursued controversial decisions, particularly on judicial appointments, the agreement began to crumble quickly, and Georgian Dream ultimately pulled out, exposing the fragility of a compromise lacking operational leverage. to counter authoritarian drift, Kapanadze points to very limited and largely symbolic measures: the suspension of a diplomatic passport of negligible political relevance, and sporadic targeted sanctions against a handful of key government figures, adopted unilaterally by individual member state. A reactive, not preventive, and largely ineffective approach, hampered by EU decision making mechanisms based on internal consensus.

On the threshold of no return

The democratic crisis in Georgia has now, according to this analysis, reached the threshold of no return. With the introduction of the Russian-style legislative framework in 2024, the operational space for think tanks, civil society organizations, and critical media outlets has been severely curtailed. Moreover, through measures adopted on May 13, 2025, a Parliament overwhelmingly dominated by Georgian Dream approved amendments to the organic laws governing political parties and the Constitutional Court, significantly broadening both the grounds and the legal instruments for declaring a political party unconstitutional. On October 16, 2025, an additional legislative package was passed allowing for the restriction of political participation for individuals associated with parties deemed at risk of dissolution. Finally, on October 28, 2025, Speaker Shalva Papuashvili announced an appeal to the Constitutional Court seeking to outlaw three major opposition blocs: Coalition for Change, the United National Movement – founded by former president and now imprisoned Mikheil Saakashvili – and Strong Georgia. Georgia, therefore, is not merely a technical dossier within the European Neighborhood Policy. It constitutes a crucial political stress test for Europe’s capacity to defend, through tangible foreign policy instruments, a society that overwhelmingly self-identifies as pro- European. An European knot: security, enlargement, credibility Ukraine has shown that EU foreign policy, until now exercised through free trade agreements, economic integration, and diplomacy, that is, through the enlargement process, is no longer sufficient on its own. The military lever, this perspective argues, should enter the European leadership’s toolbox. Guaranteeing security has become an essential prerequisite for rendering future enlargement credible. As classical international relations theory reminds us, power vacuums do not remain unfilled. And the vacuum generated by EU inaction in Georgia has once again been filled by the imposing imperial neighbor beyond the Caucasus.