On June 9 the EU announced the suspension of Georgia’s accession talks and on June 11, the declaration that followed this year's annual Nato Summit failed to include the phrase “Georgia will become a member of the Alliance with the Membership Action Plan as an integral part of the process” for the first time since it was adopted in 2008. Thus, the two leading pillars of Georgia’s foreign policy for the last twenty years – and the key aspirations of the overwhelming majority of Georgians – have been dashed.

It is not the first, but the second, time that the aspirations of the Georgian people have been dashed by the country’s two leading politicians.

Georgia today faces its deepest crisis under the leadership of the Georgian Dream Party and its ‘honorary chairman’ and dominant leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, a man whose wealth is nearly one-third of the country’s GDP. Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream came to power in 2012 after then-president Mikheil Saakashvili disgraced himself and his government by seeking to consolidate power in the face of democratic opposition and were simultaneously caught up in a fatal scandal around the brutalisation of prisoners, caught on video. Then as now, the government’s fatal flaw has been to put the interests of its leadership over those of the Georgian people.

The current crisis was triggered by the Georgian Dream’s April decision to re-introduce a law on ‘foreign agents’ that it had previously scuppered last year in the face of mass protests. This year’s protests have been even larger than last year’s but the ruling party doubled-down on the measure, even overturning a veto by President Salome Zourabichvili, elected in 2018 with Georgian Dream’s backing and Ivanishvili’s personal support. She has subsequently broken with Ivanishvili – as she once did with Saakashvili under whom she spent 18 months as foreign minister – and has since taken a leading role in calling for the creation of a united opposition ahead of Georgia’s October 26 election.

Ivanishvili only served as one year as prime minister after leading his party to victory in 2012, but has dominated Georgian politics ever since. His wealth – estimated by Forbes at $4.9bn – alone goes a long way to do so in a country with a GDP of roughly $30bn but he has repeatedly reshuffled his governments, with five different prime ministers shuffling in and out of office since his term, and hand-picking numerous former employees for top level jobs.

Georgian Dream has also made little secret of the fact that the foreign agents law has been passed because Ivanishvili demanded it. The passage of a bill, also over Zourabichvili’s veto, offering amnesty for repatriating offshore assets, also bears the imprimatur of Ivanishvili’s desires.

When Ivanishvili refused to meet with US Assistant Secretary of State Jim O'Brien during his 14 May visit, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared that the reason was because “Ivanishvili said that he was already under de facto sanctions because he had frozen 2bn [US] dollars that he had entrusted to the West, but which turned up in the hands of the Global War Party” – referring to a long-running dispute between Ivanishvili and the Swiss bank Credit Suisse over a former employee of the bank convicted of pilfering funds from Ivanishvili and other businessmen.

The ‘Global War Party’ reference on the other hand is a common trope of the increasingly conspiratorial language adapted by Georgian Dream leaders to claim they are still pursuing an agenda of allying with the West while disparaging its leading politicians, and claiming that they are seeking to pressure Georgia into becoming a second front in the Russian-Ukrainian war. Georgian Dream leaders have also adapted this legislation to disparage the opposition, which has consistently referred to the foreign agents law as the ‘Russian law’ and, more recently, labelled the government and Ivanishvili as Russian agents.

That label, however, captures more the deeply polarised nature of Georgian politics rather than the true nature of Ivanishvili and his party’s actions.

Ivanishvili’s motives are likely more rooted in the troubles of securing his assets, and additional damages from Credit Suisse ordered by a Bermuda court that the bank, taken over by erstwhile rival UBS in June 2023, is appealing, than in a move to embrace the Kremlin. Ironically the apparent ask that from Ivanishvili is that the West intervene to resolve these disputes in his favour, despite his government’s rhetoric that the ‘foreign agents law’ is about protecting Georgian sovereignty.

But there are genuine reasons for concern. The Georgian Dream government has consistently refused to bring sanctions into its own legislation and in 2023 resumed direct flights with Russia despite Western allies raising  sanctions concerns. Then in September 2023 after Washington sanctioned a former Georgian Dream-appointed attorney general, Otar Partskhaladze, for allegedly cooperating with the FSB, the government moved to minimize the fallout for Partskhaladze by pushing the central bank to briefly unfreeze his accounts, prompting three of its four governors to resign. If Georgia turns into a sanctions evasion hub, the risk of major political and macroeconomic damage is significant.

But Ivanishvili is clearly turning Georgia away from the West, despite his public pledge to lead Georgia into the EU by 2030. On May 30 the government announced awarded the contract for the repeatedly delayed, and twice cancelled, Anaklia Deep Sea Port project to a Chinese government consortium. That risks throwing a major spanner into the Western-backed plans for a ‘Middle Corridor’ through Eurasia to reroute trade from Russia. On 4 June the Georgian Dream introduced anti-LGBT legislation, an attempt to capitalise on social conservatism to bolster support ahead of the October election.

Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations again risk being undermined by the whims of one man. More major protests are likely before the October vote, and the risk of further democratic backsliding by the Georgian Dream before then is high. But Georgian voters have repeatedly made clear their commitment to these aspirations. Whether the opposition can unify, and move away from the toxic legacy of the last Georgian politician to put himself above the national interest, will shape the country’s future more than anything the West, or Russia, do.