As Georgia votes, fears of a stolen election and a return to the Kremlin’s orbit are high.

At the Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, the small Georgian town where the Soviet dictator was born, a host of guides await to tell you the story of the local boy who made it big.

They can list the birthdays of Stalin’s family and recite the poems he wrote when he was a schoolboy (for Stalin “he could have been a poet, but he chose to be a great leader”). But in other things, they are less accurate. Of the millions killed in the gulag, “mistakes were made.” About the show tests, they have little to say.

Stalin is so revered by some that when the government thought it was time to remove his towering statue in 2010, they did it unannounced at night, lest locals protest. But while some older voters in rural towns like Gori might harbor fond memories of life under communism and a Soviet past, they looked set to be swept away by younger generations who grew up knowing nothing but democracy and are glad to see Stalin consigned to the dustbin of history.

Now, as voters in the Caucasus nation cast their ballots in Saturday’s parliamentary elections, the specter of authoritarianism looms again.

Many observers fear that the ruling Georgian Dream party will do anything to stay in power. He buried the liberal values ​​he espoused when he took office 12 years ago and effectively torpedoed Georgia’s application to join the European Union. Its founder, secretive oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, has threatened to jail his political rivals after the election and ban the main opposition party.

After spending years in the shadows, Ivanishvili – who made billions in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as Georgia’s prime minister from 2012 to 2013 – returned late last year as the party’s honorary chairman and then he gave a series of conspiratorial speeches. He claims that Georgia is controlled by a foreign “pseudo-elite” and that the opposition belongs to a “World War Party” bent on drawing the country into conflict with Russia. This year, Georgian Dream went through a Kremlin style “foreign agent” law.which critics say aims to shut down watchdogs that hold the government to account.

For many, Ivanishvili’s rhetoric is eerily reminiscent of the past that many Georgians are eager to escape. And Georgia Dream’s anti-Western stance, along with the country’s controversial foreign agent law, directly mirrors President Vladimir Putin’s crackdown on domestic political opposition in neighboring Russia.

“It’s incredible how much of this old Bolshevik, Stalinist language has come back. Everyone is a traitor, everyone is a foreign agent,” Natalie Sabanadze, a member of London-based think tank Chatham House and Georgia’s former ambassador to the EU, told CNN. She described some of the statements made by Georgian Dream officials as a “copy-paste” of those from Stalin’s show trials. “Have people forgotten what it was like?” Sabanadze asks.

One speaking last month in Gori, Ivanishvili broke a taboo in Georgian society. He said Georgia should apologize for the 2008 war with Russia, which many Georgians blame on Moscow. Russia fought the five-day war in support of pro-Kremlin separatists in Georgia’s South Ossetia region, north of Gori. Combined with Abkhazia, another separatist region, Russia today de facto occupies 20% of Georgia’s territory.

Ivanishvili said an apology to Russia would help maintain the “12 years of uninterrupted peace” the country has enjoyed under Georgian Dream, which he warned the opposition could jeopardize. The message has some appeal to its rural base, but it has sparked a political firestorm.

Mikheil Saakashvili, who was president of Georgia during the war but has been imprisoned since 2021 for abuse of power during his term, appointed comments are “treason”.

Younger, more pro-European Georgians were also outraged. Their first memories are not of easier lives under communism, but of Russian tanks rolling into Gori and towards the capital, Tbilisi. Leaving the Stalin Museum – past his personal carriage, past the hut where he was born – it’s easy to find buildings still scarred with bullet holes from the 2008 war. Many buildings still lie in ruins, while Stalin Avenue has been preserved clean.

For these Georgians, Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 rekindled memories of Russian aggression in their own country. They want nothing more than for Georgia to slip out of the Kremlin’s orbit and continue its march towards a European future.

But many fear that the government is now heading in the opposite direction, and that Georgia could be on the verge of returning to the one-party regime it escaped a generation ago.

“The election will be crucial,” Davit Mzhavanadze, a researcher at the Governance Monitoring Center in Tbilisi, told CNN. “If this government retains power, Georgia will become more Belarusian than European.”

At a news conference in Tbilisi on Thursday, Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili – a pro-Western but largely ceremonial figure who urged Georgians to vote against the government – said she “rules out any other outcome than a victory for the forces pro-European,” citing polls that routinely show only about a third of the public support the Georgian Dream.

“soviet mentality”

A question that baffles many is why the former center-left Georgian dream made a sudden authoritarian pivot.

The party’s origin was unusual. It takes its name from a rap song by Ivanishvili’s son Bera. Although some suspected that Ivanishvili – whose net worth is equivalent to about a quarter of the country’s GDP – might follow a pro-Russian path, during his short tenure as prime minister he has drawn closer to Europe and even promised an eventual accession to NATO.

“A modern civil society has been a cherished goal of the Georgian people since we regained our independence 20 years ago,” Ivanishvili said. he wrote in an email to then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012 that was later leaked. “Unfortunately, old habits are hard to break.”

That proved true for his own government, Chatham House’s Sabanadze told CNN. Her career is a measure of the ideological changes of the Georgian Dream. In 2021, Sabanadze was Georgia’s ambassador to the EU. Now, she says she is troubled by the party’s shift to the right.

Having abandoned its liberal origins, Sabanadze said, the party is “clearly copying” the model of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest this year, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze praised Orban as a “role model”, repeating his claims to defend the “fatherland, language and faith”. The government has also it passed legislation that limits LGBTQ+ rights.

But now he is ready to go much further. Ivanishvili has promise a “Nuremberg trial” against members of the opposition, who were subjected to increasing persecution. During street protests in Tbilisi against the foreign agents law, Levan Khabeishvili – the president of the pro-West United National Movement (UNM) – said he was brutally beaten by the police. He appeared in parliament the next day, his face blackened and swollen.

Khabeishvili has since resigned as president, citing the effect the beating had on his health. He said the attack was meant to intimidate Georgia’s opposition. “Ivanishvili has a Soviet mentality. He’s a Soviet guy,” he told CNN.

The Georgian government did not respond to a request for comment.

Preparing for the worst

One consequence of Russia’s war in Ukraine was the EU’s decision to grant Georgia candidate status. Brussels, keen to stem Russia’s influence in former Soviet countries, has put Georgia – along with Ukraine and Moldova – on a fast track to accession.

Many say this was in spite of the Georgian Dream, rather than because of it. During protests against the “foreign agents” law, images of citizens waving EU flags being toppled by water cannons put pressure on Brussels to reward the Georgian people, more than 80% of whom support EU membership, POLLS show.

It is unclear whether Ivanishvili wanted candidate status. Joining the EU would require cleaning up the country’s judiciary and relinquishing power if Georgian Dream is voted in on Saturday. His opponents doubt he is willing to do that.

Under the country’s new proportional voting system, UNM’s Khabeishvili says Georgia’s fragmented opposition will have no trouble forming a coalition after the election. But there are fears that Ivanishvili will try to cling to power after an election loss.

If that happens, he predicts huge protests in Tbilisi and across the country. This is where things could get ugly. Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said in August, Georgia’s Western allies plot a coup to remove Georgian Dream from power. He warned that Russia would be on standby to prevent this.

For Sabanadze, the stakes couldn’t be higher: How Georgians vote on Saturday, and how the government responds, will determine whether the country stays on the path to Europe or becomes more like Belarus.

“When I was in Brussels, I thought Georgia would never become an authoritarian state again, because it’s just something we find very hard to accept,” she said. “Georgians will fight. The Belarus scenario will not happen easily.”

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