David J. Kramer & Lilia Shevtsova / The American
Interest, October 17, 2012
91After the Elections, All Eyes on Georgia
li will become the new prime minister of the country. This peaceful trans-fer of power and Saakashvili’s almost immediate acceptance of the results confounded polls and expectations.
In the Eurasia region, only Ukraine, in early 2010, has had a simi-larly peaceful transfer of power, but local elections in October of that year, and the ones for parliament on October 28, have raised serious concerns that Ukraine’s streak of decent elections is a thing of the past.
That makes what happened in Georgia even more impressive.
Georgia offers both proof of certain axioms as well as unpredictabil-ity. Let’s start with the former. The defeat of Saakashvili and the other victors of the 2003 Rose Revolution confirms the axioms established by previous transitions: Liberal technocrats are doomed to leave power after they finish painful structural reforms that trigger frustration and unhap-piness among their societies. This has been the destiny of almost all East and Central European (post-communist) reformist governments. Techno-crats usually don’t pay much attention to institutions. They are absorbed by building a liberal economy and afraid of democracy and populism, even relying on an authoritarian leader. No wonder they provoke resent-ment among two different segresent-ments of society: those who want political freedom and democracy, on the one hand, and those who want justice, on the other.
Georgia’s election proves another axiom, too: the more radical technocrats are, the bigger the pain of transformation, but the shorter its duration. The longer and more indecisive are reforms, the more drawn out is the pain and the lower the chances of success, as with Yegor Gai-dar’s reforms in Russia.
Just as the Orange Revolution is a distant memory in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia is now over. In both countries, we see the rise of oligarchs; in Georgia, it is Ivanishvili’s rise to power. This begs a question: Why do poor societies with a strong ethos of justice and equality elect oligarchs to positions of power? How will such indi-viduals govern, and what will their moral and political principles be?
In Ukraine, the oligarchs have proven that personal enrichment and preservation top any notion of national interests. Will Ivanishvili be any different?
For Saakashvili, following Putin’s or Lukashenko’s path by ignoring the results or rigging the election was not an option. Instead, he pursued a rational mode of behavior that leaves open the possibility of his return some day, should society sour on the new team. “He [Saakashvili] will cling to power,” Putin predicted before the election, projecting his own determination to stay in the Kremlin onto his Georgian nemesis. Indeed, for Putin the notion of surrendering power voluntarily after an election is so alien as to be incomprehensible, if not suicidal.
Saakashvili’s acceptance of defeat could become his greatest achieve-ment. And yet in Moscow, quite a few Russian liberals blamed the
Geor-92Crisis: Russia and the West in the Time of Troubles
gian president for abiding by the voters’ democratic verdict. “Georgia proved that people without property can’t be allowed to vote!” lamented the Russian adherents of the liberal Pinochetism. Yet history proves that it is better to go through such a defeat than to achieve “victory” through a crackdown.
In retrospect, Saakashvili was both lucky and unlucky. He was lucky to have secured support for Georgia from the West, especially the United States. Yet he was unlucky in that, for several years after coming to pow-er, he faced no real, constructive opposition, nor did he fully appreciate the benefits of such an opposition. This demonstrated yet another axiom:
Without a real opposition, the regime was prone to overplaying its hand and making mistakes.
Now for the unpredictability. The new Georgian prime minister is relatively unknown and inexperienced politically. Will Ivanishvili move in an authoritarian or populist direction? Witness his early call for Saakashvili to resign as President, followed by a quick retraction of said call. Whereas Saakashvili is all charm and charisma, Ivanishvili is an enigma: We don’t know how to score his real goals, agenda, or ability to govern. Is he beholden to Russia and the Kremlin, or his own agent? This uncertainty feeds suspicions: The name of his movement, Georgian Dream, sounds awfully Soviet and Marxist. It was commu-nist tradition to consolidate people on the basis of a dream. Moreover, dreams risk turning into disappointment, even nightmares. Besides, this movement is a temporary mix of various groups with conflicting and incompatible interests, united largely by their antipathy toward the current regime. What was it about Saakashvili’s rule that spawned the emergence of such a strange opposition? How unhappy or irritated were Georgians to vote for a party with a vague dream but no clear agenda? (These are bitter questions for Saakashvili and his technocrats to ponder.)
Another area of unpredictability looms. The two sides will have one year of the French model of government – that is, cohabitation of the powerful parliament with the less powerful presidency, until presidential elections a year from now. As election winners seek to build their rule and define their policies, the losers will remain in the presi-dency while getting accustomed to becoming the new opposition. All bets are off during this cohabitation period, including a tug of war between the competing sides or attempts by the new leaders to monopo-lize power – or possibly just gridlock. Nonetheless, the way Georgians behaved during the elections holds promise that the country will move peacefully toward a parliamentary system. Some countries (Slovakia under Vladimir Meciar, Viktor Orban’s Hungary) have shown that the prime minister in such systems can act on authoritarian inclinations.
But in the Eurasia region, in a departure from Soviet and post-Soviet tra-dition, Georgia will be one of the first (after Moldova and more uneasily
93After the Elections, All Eyes on Georgia
Kyrgyzstan) to begin this experiment. Georgia’s neighbors will be taking note of what happens.
Of course, Georgia begins its experiment in a complicated and un-friendly international atmosphere. Europe is dealing with its own crisis, and the United States has reduced its previous interest in Tbilisi while focusing more on Russia. The Kremlin, meanwhile, is becoming more assertive as it seeks to justify its increasingly repressive domestic trends, following the Russian tradition: When the authorities fear their power weakening, they look for external threats and objects for bullying. Geor-gia is the perfect target for macho posturing.
The last area of unpredictability involves the balancing act for the new Georgian leader in preserving Georgia’s pro-Western trajectory while improving ties with Moscow. But here is the trap: For the Kremlin, any dialogue means concessions, as we have seen with Russia’s pressure on Ukraine. Putin’s Kremlin will want Georgia to return to Russia’s em-brace. Will Ivanishvili be able to resist such pressure? Yanukovich has not succeeded and has even antagonized the West. Increasingly, he is left at the mercy of Putin’s whims. With interest in Georgia flagging in the West, this balance will be even harder to strike for Ivanishvili.
These unpredictable areas notwithstanding, Georgia has opened a new chapter, but its new leaders and soon-to-be new opposition must prove that they know that democracy entails working for the greater good. Given their location and size, they can afford nothing short of coming together as a nation. Everyone in the region will be watching, some hoping for failure while others pray for success. Georgia will need patience, understanding, and assistance from the West, because its larg-est neighbor to the north will be working to undermine it.
“With an elite that seeks only to protect its own interests, and with-out any alternative force in society, crisis is the only thing capable of stirring the swamp.” 1
Recent developments in Russia demonstrate that the society is awak-ening, and that the country sooner or later will face a moment of truth, as it did twice in the past century when it had to solve a dilemma: whether to de-hermetize or to reproduce its system of personalized power that can only push the nation toward disaster. In 1917 the Russian Revolution produced a new incarnation of the country’s traditional matrix of person-alized power, statism, and imperialism in the form of communism, which succeeded in becoming a global alternative to liberal democracy. In 1991 the country’s elite instituted a different model of the Russian Matrix by dumping the Soviet Union and communist ideology. Personalized power in the communist disguise existed for 74 years. The new-old Russian sys-tem consolidated during the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Dmitri Medvedev has started to show cracks after 21 years. The chal-lenge the nation faces today is existential: Either the society succeeds in transforming the system of personalized rule that suffocates it, or Rus-sia will lose its energy and end in rot or implosion. There is only one way out of this civilizational trap, and that is through pressure from below. But will the new Russian revolution be a transformational “velvet” one, or will it again create a more predatory form of rule?
To the Bitter End
Russia has always been a land of paradoxes. Is it not a paradox, after all, when democrats bring an autocrat to power and then protect him from competition, as Rus-sia’s democrats did in 1989–91 in supporting Yeltsin? And was it not a paradox when, in the 1990s, the West assisted Russia in its reforms only to discover later that in reality it