The municipal elections held in Georgia on October 4 resulted in yet another resounding victory for the ruling party, Georgian Dream. Its candidates took first place in all sixty-four municipalities across the country, and even in the capital Tbilisi, where support for the opposition is traditionally strong, the party’s incumbent mayor Kakha Kaladze was re-elected without much difficulty.
The official turnout (41 percent) was 10 percentage points lower than in the previous elections in 2021. However, neither the street protests that have been ongoing since last year’s parliamentary elections nor Western criticism have been able to shake the Georgian Dream’s dominance of the country’s politics. Meanwhile, the contradictory actions of the opposition, which went into the elections without a unified strategy, only deepened public apathy.
As a result, Georgian Dream’s opponents have been conclusively marginalized from institutional politics, paving the way for a further tightening of the screws by the regime. Yet against the backdrop of Georgia’s current economic boom, rhetoric about curtailing civil liberties and the “threat of Russification” is proving insufficient to galvanize people into large-scale protests.
In the wake of parliamentary elections last fall that were criticized for numerous violations, the Georgian opposition embarked on a boycott, refusing to take up the fifty-one out of 150 seats in parliament they had won thanks to their official result of 38 percent of the vote.
At the time, amid widespread anti-government protests and Western criticism of Georgian Dream, such a strategy seemed justified. Why settle for a secondary role in parliament if the ruling party could be forced to succumb to the dual pressure from Western leaders and numerous street protests and call new elections? The European Union did indeed threaten the Georgian authorities with sanctions, which would have derailed the EU integration policy supported by the vast majority of Georgians.
A year on, however, the protests have fizzled out, the West remains reluctant to impose serious sanctions against Georgia, and the opposition has yet to develop a clear strategy: should they return to fighting Georgian Dream within the framework of institutional rules and elections, or continue to rely on street protests and boycotts?
Ultimately, this dilemma only exacerbated the divide within the Georgian opposition, which was already plagued by internecine conflict. Two of the four opposition coalitions voted into parliament last year decided to take part in the municipal elections: Lelo/Strong Georgia, led by the businessman Mamuka Khazaradze, and former prime minister Giorgi Gakharia’s party For Georgia. The other two—the liberal Coalition for Change and the United National Movement—decided to boycott the elections and called on their supporters to take to the streets after the vote, in order to “set our country back on the path to Europe” after being “surrendered” to Russia in the thirteen years of Georgian Dream’s rule.
Neither approach yielded any particular results. The participation of some opposition parties in the elections failed to prevent candidates from Georgian Dream from sweeping the board, and in twenty-five of the 64 municipalities, representatives of the regime did not even face any challengers from major parties.
The street protests that followed the vote attracted considerable media coverage, but fell short of the promised “peaceful revolution.” Far fewer people took to the streets this time than for last year’s protests against the foreign agents law or the falsifications in the parliamentary elections. An attempt to storm the presidential palace merely gave the authorities a pretext for more arrests and accusations of planning a coup “in the interests of foreign forces.”
Georgian Dream’s resilience to both internal and external pressure can be explained by many factors. First and foremost, over its thirteen years in power, the party has learned to consolidate its control over the political system slowly enough to avoid provoking too much resistance.
Georgian Dream arrests protesters and opposition figures, restricts funding for independent media and NGOs, and is constantly inventing new tools for putting pressure on dissenters. But it does all of that without taking drastic steps that could escalate the protests enough to bring moderate voters out onto the streets. Opposition TV channels like Formula and TV Pirveli continue to broadcast, and while pressure on government critics is growing, it’s not yet comparable to the situation in Russia or Belarus.
Social tensions are being further mitigated by a sustained economic boom. Georgia’s GDP grew a robust 7.9 percent year-on-year from January to August. Exports during this period increased by 13.7 percent, state budget revenues climbed 8 percent, and by mid-2025, the average nominal salary was 10.3 percent higher than the previous year.
At the same time, Georgian Dream’s consolidation of power at home does not yet extend to its foreign policy adventures. The party’s anti-Western rhetoric is largely limited to a proclamatory fight against political forces that it dubs the “party of war,” which the authorities accuse of attempting to drag Tbilisi into the Russia-Ukraine war, and to the safeguarding of “traditional values” from “LGBT initiatives” they say have been imposed. However, limited dialogue and economic ties with the West are still in place; visa requirements to travel to the EU, though considered, have not been reimposed; and there is no talk of large-scale sanctions against the Georgian economy.
Nor has the status quo in relations with Russia changed: economic cooperation is developing, contributing to the growth in the Georgian economy, while Georgian Dream’s statements about plans to regain control over the country’s Russia-backed breakaway territories of South Ossetia and Abkhazia remain mere declarations.
The opposition’s refusal to participate in the recent elections is unlikely to have come as a surprise to anyone in Georgian society or the European Union. Brussels is used to such problems in candidate countries: Albania and Serbia have also seen such boycotts in recent years. It’s not even the first time it has happened in Georgia: after the previous parliamentary elections in 2020, in which opposition parties won about a third of the seats in parliament, they also spent almost a year renouncing their mandates and seeking to have the results declared invalid.
Previous boycotts were not successful in weakening Georgian Dream, and the opposition was ultimately forced to return to the institutional arena—only on worse terms. The current situation looks set to be no exception: unless there is a sharp deterioration in the economic situation or serious mistakes are made by the authorities, opposition parties will have no choice but to return to working within the framework of deteriorating political institutions.
With its vacillatory performance during the municipal elections, the opposition failed to break this cycle. If anything, it demoralized its supporters. Now there will be practically no opposition to keep the government in check—at either a national or local level—until the next parliamentary elections. There’s no doubt that Georgian Dream will take advantage of this to tighten the screws even further and to weaken its opponents.
