The Rise of Socially Conservative Georgia
Georgia’s ruling party is deploying social conservatism to win votes in forthcoming parliamentary elections.
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The first reading of anti-LGBT+ legislation was passed by the ruling party in late June. The bill, entitled “On the Protection of Family Values and Minors,” along with 18 related amendments touching various national laws, has several purposes.
It was approved with 78 votes in favor and none against since most opposition members are currently engaged in a boycott of parliamentary business related to what they term authoritarian legislation on so-called foreign agents, which they have branded the “Russia law.”
The publicly stated aim of the package is to ban sex changes and adoptions by same-sex couples. It also intends to prevent gatherings that could be seen as propagandizing same-sex family values. Moreover, the bill also looks to ban gender-neutral language and the promotion of any work that would propagate non-heterosexual relationships and gender identity.
The likelier purpose of the legislation is to martial support for the ruling Georgian Dream with a naked appeal to Georgian social conservatism.
It has been pointed out that the anti-LGBT+ draft was not really that urgent; same-sex marriages have been prohibited by the Georgian constitution since 2018.
Surprisingly to some in the West, most Georgians do not share their social liberalism despite overwhelmingly pro-EU/NATO views. There is little enthusiasm for LGBT+ parades or gay marriage. As proof, since the bill was announced there has been no major public demonstration and public reaction has been largely muted on social media.
This is not new. There has been occasional but serious violence against the LGBT+ community during pride parades, some of which spread to assault on journalists.
Until now, politicians largely avoided tapping into this conservative sentiment. But that restraint has now clearly ended, with Georgian Dream now actively and quite successfully using the anti-LGBT+ issue to advance its electoral chances.
The parliamentary elections in late October are crucial to the country’s future. They could extend the ruling party’s hold on power for an unprecedented fourth term. No single political party in the country’s modern history has managed more than two.
And this is not just any election — Georgian Dream’s passage of the foreign agents law despite enormous popular protests, overwhelming enthusiasm for Western economic and military groupings like the EU and NATO, and the fierce opposition of Western governments indicates that the country is approaching a crossroads.
The distance between Georgian Dream’s behavior and European norms was underlined on June 26, when the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe, issued its opinion on the draft constitutional law within the legislative package.
The Commission urged the Georgian government to either completely reconsider the bill or at least amend certain articles to prevent discrimination against LGBT+ individuals and ensure alignment with the European Convention on Human Rights.
The EU has now made clear that Georgia’s membership bid is frozen because of the foreign agents law and the new legislation is only likely to worsen the relationship with European institutions, as well as the US.
Georgian Dream’s guiding light, the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has paired the agents and anti-LGBT+ laws as measures to save the country from a hostile, global “party of war” plotting against Georgia. His approach has been applauded by Russia.
The latest polls indicate that no single party will win a majority at October’s elections, suggesting the future is likely to involve multi-party coalitions.
That would significantly curtail the Georgian Dream’s power. Thus an appeal to the conservative elements of the population is now seen as its only viable path to victory.
Social conservatism is an appealing political weapon in the politics of nations at the periphery of Europe, where smaller countries neighbor greater powers like Russia. This is not fertile geopolitical territory for ultra-liberal views to flower.
Ultimately, Georgia might end up in a similar situation as Turkey, another EU candidate country, where membership prospects are now seen as no longer realistic because of the country’s internal dynamics and what it terms a multi-vector foreign policy (something allowing a fully flexible policy towards Russia and other authoritarian states.)
Indeed, though much attention in Georgia has been focused on the agents law, the bill On the Protection of Family Values and Minors deepens the differences between Tbilisi and the EU/NATO.
Georgia is a puzzling case. It shows that despite an overwhelmingly pro-Western outlook, it can also be highly conservative. Georgian Dream is keen to suggest to voters that a choice to join the West would tear the traditional social fabric. It is now a central battleground issue for October and beyond.
Emil Avdaliani is a professor of international relations at European University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and a scholar of silk roads.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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