Georgian oligarch and founder of the ruling Georgian Dream party, Bidzina Ivanishvili
But let’s not forget that Ivanishvili won more because people were fed up with the way Georgia was being run at the time. There was genuine dissatisfaction with the UNM (United National Movement, which ruled from 2003-12) and with the old [UNM founder and former President Mikheil] Saakashvili approach. And many Georgians felt exhausted and felt that it was time for a rotation of power. And those are reasonable things to wish for. We didn’t know at the time that this would be the last free election.
The other side has a powerful toolbox. This combination of money, propaganda, psychological warfare, administrative resources, straightforward muscle is a pretty effective arsenal.”
I think that the fundamental message of this is that the bad guys win when the good guys screw up. And again and again, we see parties which are supposedly Atlanticist, pro-business, pro-civil society, [and] small-“l” liberal coming to power, and they don’t actually run the country very well. And then the voters get fed up and they vote for a change, and the change is often worse in a different direction.
In the end, Orban came back to power in Hungary [in 2010] because the other lot screwed up. [Left-wing populist Smer party Prime Minister Robert] Fico has come back in Slovakia because the other lot screwed up. Bulgarians are voting in despair or not voting at all because of the failure of the centrist, smaller liberal parties in Bulgaria. And I could go on.
And so I think it will be written on the tombstone of the post-1991 liberal consensus: You had all the right ideas, but you failed to implement them.
RFE/RL: You mentioned in the Georgian context that irrespective of the falsifications, et cetera, the ruling party still did better than expected.
Lucas: I think the scare campaign [worked]…. You know, talking even to Georgians here in London, they felt that in the end they would rather be safe than free, to put it brutally. In a fair election with proper scrutiny and equal access to media and to public advertising and so on, I suspect Georgian Dream would have done less well. And I think their rather contradictory message is that, “We are actually pro-European, just by a different way; but if you pick the other lot, there’s going to be war…”
I’m afraid that the other side has a powerful toolbox. This combination of money, propaganda, psychological warfare, administrative resources, straightforward muscle is a pretty effective arsenal, and we’ve seen it in many countries. And if the bad guys have the guns and the money and the access to the media and to the other levers of power, and the good guys have the right ideas and nice people, it’s not enough.
The bad guys win when the good guys screw up.”
And we need to think, I think, quite profoundly about how we defend democracy against this sort of authoritarian tool kit. It’s no comfort for the Georgians, but this is happening all over the place.
RFE/RL: If they genuinely believe what the government narrative is, can you really blame them for choosing peace ahead of any sort of European integration?
Lucas: I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and there was a very common phrase then: “Better red than dead” — the idea that the thought of a nuclear holocaust was terrifying and that people said it would be better to give the Soviet Union whatever it wanted rather than the choice between starvation and dying of radiation sickness in the ashes of a city that had been destroyed by nuclear weapons.
Now, of course, Russia weaponized that fear and used it to stoke the so-called peace movement, which was a major factor in Britain and in Western Europe generally in the late ’70s and ’80s. If a scare tactic works, I, to some extent, blame the people who believe in it, and I blame the perpetrators of the scare tactic, but I mainly blame the people who have failed to provide a convincing alternative narrative. As I said before, the bad guys win when the good guys screw up.
When Lukashenka goes, if the conditions are right and Moscow’s weak, one could imagine Belarus joining the European Union, perhaps before Georgia does.”
RFE/RL: Is it possible that Ivanishvili can cut some sort of a deal with the West? Could the West somehow acquiesce to having this kind of Georgia?
Lucas: I think that’s a question probably for Georgians to answer. I think what we see is that [Belarusian ruler Alyaksandr] Lukashenka and to some extent also [President Aleksandar] Vucic in Serbia play this game of playing the West off of others. And in the end, we need Georgia for some things: Geographical location is important; you’re a transit country.
And it may well be that, in a number of months or years, people in Brussels or Washington or wherever will say, “Look, we need a reset; there’s no point in keeping Georgia out in the cold. It may be bad, but Azerbaijan is worse and we deal with the Azeris, and in the end we need the oil or the gas or whatever. And so if we don’t get in there, it will only make things worse.”
We’ve seen this with Lukashenka, as well. Lukashenka says to the West, “Give me money and help and recognition, and I’ll release a few prisoners and try to play nice.”
RFE/RL: And look how it worked out for Belarus and its people.
Lucas: Well, Lukashenka would argue that he’s kept Belarus out of all the wars. And despite Lukashenka, Belarus is in a far better state than it was 30 years ago. It’s become a modern society. And I think when Lukashenka goes, if the conditions are right and Moscow’s weak, one could imagine Belarus joining the European Union, perhaps before Georgia does.
What happens at the high level of politics is only part of the story. And I think that the fundamental dynamic of post-Soviet societies is the stronger, a sort of embourgeoisement of the new middle class — in a very broad sense, people forgetting the historical traumas of the past and becoming better connected with the outside world. Those trends are basically benign.
So I hope that despite this bad election result, other things in Georgia will continue to improve and develop, and that at a future point Georgia will be able to reemerge into the Western geopolitical mainstream in a stronger state than it is now. But I see no cause for immediate optimism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Publish date : 2024-10-31 11:03:00
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