Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, is often described as pro-Russian. Yet support among Georgian society for joining the EU and NATO is so strong that the party would surely not have been able to remain in power for so long (twelve years and counting) if it had not at least paid lip service to following a pro-Western path. Amid increasingly strained relations with the West in recent years, Georgian Dream managed to convince a significant number of Georgian voters that rapprochement with the West had simply been postponed until more “reasonable” forces that share “true” Western values returned to power there.
With the return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, that moment has arrived—and yet Tbilisi still finds itself unable to improve relations with the new U.S. administration. Now there is no longer anyone else to blame for the discord with the West, which leaves Georgian Dream facing a dilemma. It will have to either make serious concessions to unfreeze talks with the West, or embark on a risky experiment to change the mentality of Georgians, the vast majority of whom still see themselves as part of the Western world.
In 2024, Georgian Dream showed that it was willing to sacrifice relations with the West to strengthen its power at home by adopting repressive legislation. In theory, that should have caused a revolution in a country where the absolute majority of the population supports EU integration, and where the obligation to pursue a pro-Western policy is written into the constitution. Yet Georgian Dream was able to hold on to power by playing on the fragmentation of the opposition and the fear of war with Russia.
All the party’s rhetoric about suspending negotiations with the EU shifted responsibility elsewhere: the Georgian government repeated that the discord with Brussels was not initiated by Tbilisi, but by the “global war party” operating in the West, which supposedly wanted to drag the country into a conflict with Russia. This same claim was used to justify the fight against the opposition, the media, and NGOs funded by the West.
Georgian Dream truly did have high hopes for Donald Trump’s return to power, seeing him as ready to pursue a pragmatic foreign policy unencumbered by ideology. At the end of last year, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said that the ruling party would do “everything possible” to reset relations with the United States.
Trump’s return to the White House was supposed to normalize Tbilisi’s relations with the West for another reason, too. The founder and informal leader of Georgian Dream, Bidzina Ivanishvili, predicted that the change in U.S. administration would herald the end of the war in Ukraine. That, in turn, would eliminate the main irritant in Georgia-EU relations: what Tbilisi views as attempts to drag the country into a conflict with Russia. “As long as there is a first front in Ukraine, there will be interest in opening a second front in Georgia,” the party’s political council said shortly before Trump’s inauguration.
Georgian Dream was also counting on rapprochement with the Trump administration based on shared conservative values. Over the past few years, the party has become a typical right-wing populist force, positioning itself as a champion of “traditional values” and fighting against “liberal fascism” and “LGBT propaganda.” The party has begun to repeat Trump almost verbatim, talking about a “deep state” that supposedly controls Western countries and prevents them from establishing better relations with Tbilisi.
Despite their ideological alignment, Georgian Dream has so far been unable to take advantage of the change of administration in Washington. Neither Trump nor anyone from his team has even mentioned Georgia, and nothing is known about Washington’s new strategy for the South Caucasus as a whole. The White House is clearly preoccupied with more global and pressing issues.
Trump has not rescinded the Biden administration’s orders to freeze financial support for Georgia and suspend the strategic partnership. And judging by the large-scale review of U.S. foreign aid currently under way in Washington, that is unlikely to change anytime soon.
No one from Georgia’s ruling party was even invited to Trump’s inauguration, though right-wing politicians from all over the world were in attendance—and so was former Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, who has gone over to the opposition. She is trying to talk to Trump in a language he understands, criticizing the lack of toughness of his predecessor Joe Biden and emphasizing Georgia’s rapprochement with China and Iran under Georgian Dream.
The Georgian opposition has also been making headway in Europe, slowly but surely trying to persuade the EU not to recognize the results of the 2024 parliamentary elections. By the end of last year, the Nordic and Baltic countries had called on Tbilisi to hold new elections, and in January, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe suspended many of the Georgian delegation’s rights until the country held a new vote, among other conditions.
This failure to jump-start relations with the West could become a major problem for Georgian Dream. Despite all of its disputes with Western capitals in recent years, the party had remained unsinkable because it always kept open a window for the normalization of relations. Both Brussels and Washington under Biden may have criticized Tbilisi, but no one ever said that the country could not join the EU while Georgian Dream was in power. The criticism was much more targeted and mainly concerned specific laws that the ruling party had adopted in recent years.
As a result, the party still had the option of repealing some of the laws that had so irritated the West, making symbolic concessions to the opposition, and resuming negotiations on joining the EU. Now the Georgian authorities are approaching the point where there may simply not be enough influential Western leaders still willing to talk to Tbilisi about developing relations.
Nor is there is any sign that Georgian Dream is ready to make concessions. On the contrary, the government is toughening the penalties for participating in protest rallies. Violations that were previously punishable by fines are now becoming criminal offenses, and protesters can now be detained for sixty days, up from fifteen.
Given that there have been no truly violent clashes or vandalism in Georgia in recent months, these measures look excessive. But the ruling party seems determined to suppress any discontent. It has also announced the creation of a commission to investigate the crimes of the United National Movement, the country’s largest opposition force. And on February 5, the Georgian Dream faction—the biggest in parliament—voted to strip forty-nine opposition deputies of their mandates for having refused to take up their seats in protest against electoral violations.
The government may subsequently begin to implement its pre-election threat to jail all its opponents. Nor is the fight against the opposition contained to the courts: opposition figures have already started being attacked on the streets.
In these circumstances, the Georgian Dream regime is entering a new era in which there is simply no prospect of the country joining the EU under the current government. Given Georgian society’s pro-Western leanings, it’s a risky time for the country.
