Georgia’s election last month was declared a victory for the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party – though the results are still disputed.

But in some places, this victory was far more emphatic than elsewhere. Georgia’s rural areas tended –  with the help of extensive vote-buying and intimidation, the opposition argues – to vote overwhelmingly in favour of GD. Two communities in particular have garnered attention in this regard: Georgia’s ethnic Armenian and Azerbaijani communities. 

At roughly 5% and 6%, respectively, of the country’s population, ethnic Armenians and Azerbaijanis represent Georgia’s two largest national minority groups. Armenians are split largely into two geographic groups – one forming the vast majority of the population in Georgia’s southwest region of Javakheti, the other living in the capital, Tbilisi. Georgian Azerbaijanis, meanwhile, largely live south and southeast of the capital, in the province known as Kvemo Kartli. While precise statistics are hard to find, reports indicate that both the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities voted en masse for Georgian Dream on October 26.

There are plenty of similarities in how the vote went with each community – as largely rural populations, election day in both Javakheti and Kvemo Kartli was broadly analogous to many areas of the Georgian countryside. Both communities are also particularly isolated from the Georgian body politic, with only a small percentage having any command of the Georgian language at all, making each particularly vulnerable to manipulation. 

But there was one major difference with regards to Georgian Azerbaijanis: outside interference, as neighbouring Azerbaijan ran a concerted campaign to deliver the Georgian Azerbaijani vote to GD. While Georgia’s opposition has cried foul about Moscow’s interference in the election, it seems as though Baku was, in fact, the greatest culprit in this regard.

A ghost campaign

Of all the ethnic minorities in Georgia, Armenians are perhaps the most storied. The Armenian community played a key role in Tbilisi’s development under the Russian Empire in the 19th century: the vast majority of the city’s mayors in that era were ethnic Armenians, while Armenians outnumbered Georgians in the city at the turn of the 20th century. 

Relations between the two groups have been more tense in recent decades, as Georgia’s Orthodox Church has sought to take control of Tbilisi’s Armenian churches and Armenophobia became a well-documented phenomenon in Georgian society more generally. Instances of this were on display even in the recent election campaign: a reporter from a pro-GD channel confronted opposition leader Mamuka Khazaradze, accusing him of “concealing” his “true Armenian heritage”.

Despite this, Georgia’s Armenian community voted with seeming enthusiasm for the ruling party in great numbers – something which may seem counterintuitive at first. 

“Elections here [in Javakheti] are always manipulated,” wrote Olesya Vartanyan, a longtime Caucasus analyst and Javakheti native, on X. She pointed out that the region had been left out of the election campaign almost entirely, even compared to previous votes. 

“No opposition leaders visited the region, no real campaign appeared in local media, and only a few posters went up days before election day,” Vartanyan wrote. “Meanwhile, GD mobilised its entire civil and security networks intensively to secure votes,” she added.

One major factor in the ruling party’s success among the Javakheti Armenians was their stranglehold on rural areas overall - whether minority or otherwise.

“As the joke goes in Georgia, an opposition party member is campaigning in a rural area, and asks a citizen for their vote,” explains Dustin Gilbreath, a non-resident senior fellow at Tbilisi’s Caucasus Research Resource Center. “The voter says, ‘I promise to vote for you when you're in office’. At a deeper level, when we look at ethnic minority areas of Georgia, they always have a higher vote share for whichever party is in power. In this regard, there has generally been an agreement between authorities and ethnic minority communities that so long as the vote goes for the government, the government will allow greater autonomy for people in minority communities,” Gilbreath said.

The ease of carrying out vote-buying in the region was succinctly demonstrated by Georgian reporters, who showed in a video how locals openly admitted they received GEL100 to GEL150  ($35-$55) for voting for GD. The threat – often followed by the enactment – of violence against opposition campaigners also played a role in their absence from, and subsequent poor performance in, regions such as Javakheti.

“The key reason [for a lack of opposition activity] is that when opposition people went to campaign in rural areas, they were often beaten up,” Gilbreath says. “This is an unfortunate reality for campaigns in Georgia outside Tbilisi.”

Sinister dynamics

While Georgia’s Armenian community thus followed a similar trajectory to many other areas of the Georgian countryside, far more sinister dynamics were at play with regards to the country’s ethnic Azerbaijani vote.

In the weeks leading up to the vote, the authoritarian regime of neighbouring Azerbaijan went into overdrive to support Georgian Dream. Leaked messages obtained by Mikroskop, an Azerbaijani investigative outlet, demonstrated a coordinated campaign ordered by Baku to support Georgia’s ruling party by all means possible. 

Azerbaijani officials, state media, government-organised NGOs and others were all tasked with delivering the vote of Georgia’s Azerbaijani community to GD. Using the same messaging of GD – that  “the West is trying to force Georgia to open a ‘second front’ against Russia,” that Georgians had “chosen peace and prosperity over war”, and that Georgians had refused to become a “colony of the West” - these same state actors then celebrated GD’s victory. 

Azerbaijani MPs and state media followed the election by reminding GD that “Azerbaijani voters make up approximately 7-8 percent of the total votes for the ruling party”, and that GD should reward Georgia’s Azerbaijani community – and by extension, Azerbaijan itself - for their "loyalty to the state”.

These acts of brazen interference in Georgia’s election played out in instances of severe electoral fraud and intimidation on the day of the vote itself. Perhaps the most infamous video of the day came from Marneuli, an Azerbaijani-majority city south of Tbilisi, where a local official with ties to GD was filmed stuffing a handful of ballots directly into a ballot box. In Iormughanlo, another large ethnic Azerbaijani village, locals confirmed that they were paid for their votes. 

While the lack of subtlety in Baku’s campaign was perhaps surprising, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev’s support for Georgian Dream was not.

“[Aliyev likes] having partners in crime, other authoritarian figures, running a neighbouring country,” says Arzu Geybulla, an Azerbaijani journalist. “The government of Azerbaijan has been paying attention to the protests ongoing in Georgia basically nonstop since 2020, and taking into account what happened in Armenia in 2018 [where street protests unseated Serzh Sargsyan, Armenia’s authoritarian president], a change of government in Georgia would have left Azerbaijan sort of isolated in the region. So it’s very much in the Azerbaijani government’s interest for GD to remain in power,” Geybulla says.

While Azerbaijan’s government has long had a strong influence over Georgia’s ethnic Azerbaijani community, providing nationalist textbooks to schools in the region, it has ramped up its involvement in recent years, growing closer with GD as the regime comes to increasingly resemble that in Baku.

“I was watching a video of one Azerbaijani parliament member who was observing the election in Georgia, talking about how well the election process went, how he didn’t see any violations,” Geybulla says. “And it was just mind-blowing to me how much the whole process resembled the ‘elections’ in Azerbaijan. They were presented the exact same way in our [Azerbaijani] media,” she says.

In the end, both the Armenian and Azerbaijani communities of Georgia, their electoral use fulfilled, are likely to be left to languish in poverty and underdevelopment, as has been the case for Georgia’s entire independent history.

“Azerbaijan, and Georgian Dream, only use them [Georgia’s Azerbaijani community] when there’s a need,” Geybulla says. “Aside from that, they’re just left to their own devices. When they need help with public services, with schools or something else, they’re on their own.”