Georgia hopes over Europe turn to disappointment

Ask David Usupashvili, speaker of Georgia’s parliament, if the country’s dozen-year commitment to integration with Nato and the EU is intact despite recent political turbulence and the Ukraine conflict, and he flips the question round. Ask western leaders, he says, not us.

Tbilisi had hoped to celebrate this week securing a visa liberalisation agreement with the EU, at a summit in Riga. Instead, the plan has been delayed — Georgian officials fear for political reasons.

While the former Soviet republic did sign a groundbreaking EU association agreement and free trade deal in July last year, ordinary Georgians have felt little benefit so far. Visa-free travel would be tangible to all.

In September last year, meanwhile, even with the east Ukraine conflict raging, Georgia failed at Nato’s Cardiff summit to win a long-coveted “membership action plan”, or path to joining.

“What I’m learning from world politics is that the smaller a country is, the smaller its right to disappointment,” says Mr Usupashvili. “We have to delete the word disappointment from our vocabulary.”

But amid an economic slowdown caused partly by the recession in neighbouring Russia that has wiped a third off the value of the national currency, disappointment is registering with Georgians. It is opening the door, too, to renewed Russian influence.

A poll by the US National Democratic Institute last week showed 31 per cent of Georgians supported joining the Eurasian Union, the integration project among former Soviet states that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is setting up as a geopolitical rival to the EU. While two-thirds still backed western integration, the proportion supporting the alternative has doubled in a year.

“We need a carrot” from the west, says Eka Metreveli of the Georgian Foundation for Strategic and International Studies. “There’s the feeling that we’re trying, but nothing is happening. And Russia is here.”

Any shift back towards Russian influence would have ramifications well beyond Georgia’s borders. Since Mikheil Saakashvili led the 2003 “Rose” revolution, Georgia has been seen as an economic reform champion and democratic beacon among former Soviet republics.

Its location, moreover, is highly strategic. Oil and gas pipelines run across the country from Azerbaijan to the west that provide Europe with an alternative to Russian energy.

Mr Usupashvili points to the barely 75km-wide corridor between the breakaway region of South Ossetia, occupied by Russia since its five-day war with Georgia in 2008, and Armenia to the south, which this year joined Russia’s Eurasian Union.

If Moscow closes that gap, he notes, it controls “everything from Iran’s border to the North Pole”.

The Ukraine conflict has started to shift Georgians’ opinions towards Russia. While it caused jitters among Georgians, one foreign diplomat says it also provoked “nervous excitement” that Nato might finally fulfil a 2008 declaration that Georgia would one day join.

Instead, Nato is seen as ducking that commitment, and the west as failing Ukraine — whose conflict with Russia exploded after ex-president Viktor Yanukovich was ousted by Ukrainians when he refused to sign an EU deal.

“Many Georgians see Europe as weak and indecisive. But Putin looks like a strong guy who’s getting his way,” says Ghia Nodia, a political scientist at Tbilisi’s Ilia State University. “So people think, what exactly are the benefits from Europe? Maybe it’s silly to resist Russia so much.”

The surprise defeat of Mr Saakashvili’s government in 2012 elections by the six-party Georgian Dream coalition of billionaire businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili also played a role.

Georgian Dream has stuck to the goal of western integration, but under current prime minister Ikakli Garibashvili has sought in parallel to rebuild relations with Moscow.

A resulting removal of bans imposed by Moscow a decade ago on Georgian wine, mineral water and farm goods has boosted the economy. But it rekindled rural support for Russia, seen by farmers as a far more promising market than the EU.

The Georgian Dream government also allowed Russian TV channels, banned after the 2008 war, to broadcast in Georgia again. Pro-Russian voices, largely silenced under the previous government, can be heard on Georgian media.

“Russia’s soft power is changing the landscape,” says Ms Metreveli. “Its propaganda is getting stronger and stronger.”

Parts of Georgia’s conservative Orthodox church have found common cause with its Russian counterpart in denouncing alleged western attacks on traditional values through, for example, promotion of gay rights.

Western-leaning politicians and analysts point to a growing influence of pro-Russian groups, such as Georgia’s Eurasian Choice, a coalition of non-government organisations that claims to have 16,000 members.

But Russia is using harder power, too. In recent months Moscow has signed agreements that come close to outright annexation of Russian-occupied South Ossetia and similarly Abkhazia. Pro-Russian parties have seized on those moves to insist Georgia’s only chance of winning back its breakaway regions is through allying again with Moscow.

Still, analysts say Kremlin supporting parties are unlikely to win parliamentary elections due in October 2016. But they could form a large enough minority to prevent pro-western parties from gaining overall control.

In the meantime, says Tedo Japaridze, a veteran diplomat and chairman of the parliament’s foreign relations committee, Moscow will continue flexing its muscles — as with its huge military parade on May 9.

“People say that was a message for the west,” he says. “But it wasn’t for them, it was a message for us. To behave.”