This October’s general election is “a referendum between Georgia’s European future or non-European future”, Tinatin Bokuchava, the recently elected chair of Georgia’s leading opposition party, the United National Movement, told bne IntelliNews in an interview in Tbilisi. 

In the elections the Georgian people will face a choice between rapidly consolidating, Russian-style authoritarianism under the ruling Georgian Dream party, and a democratic future aligned with Euro-Atlantic values should the pro-Western opposition take power, the UNM leader argues. 

“If the elections reflect the will of the citizens I am certain this will bring about regime change,” Bokuchava says, suggesting that an end to 12 years of Georgian Dream rule could be imminent. 

Despite its pro-European rhetoric, controversial actions by Georgian Dream have so far succeeded in sabotaging Georgia’s accession to the EU, most recently by passing a “foreign agent” (dubbed Russian) law aimed at cracking down on NGO operations in the country.

“[Georgian Dream founder Bidzina] Ivanishvili’s anti-democratic, and therefore, anti-Western policies have not only threatened the EU path but have irreversibly derailed it,” claims Bokuchava. “The door is closed for Georgia…Ivanishvili has closed it”. 

Recent GD legislation has indeed forced Brussels to unequivocally “pause” Georgia’s EU membership process and negotiations will not resume until Georgia is firmly back on a Europe-approved track, EU officials have indicated. 

Should her party win a majority in the autumn, Bokuchava explains, the main goal of a UNM government – and of the whole Georgian nation – will be making the necessary changes to quickly return Georgia onto the European path. 

“I believe that if there is peaceful regime change in October, then very quickly following that we will see accession negotiations being offered again to Georgia”, she says. 

The new UNM chair  predicts that a new pro-Western democratic government, should they be elected, will be so focused on the EU reform agenda that “an offer of good faith will be provided from the EU” once Brussels sees that Georgia is committed to joining. 

“Our guarantor for security, stability and prosperity can only be membership to the EU and eventually also Nato. The Georgian people understand that”, she says. 

41-year-old Bokuchava was elected as UNM chair in June, adding to her existing responsibilities as head of the UNM parliamentary faction, Strength is in Unity, the largest in the Georgian parliament. Since her appointment as chair her focus has shifted to the wider party and preparation for the elections, she says.

UNM’s current electoral strategy, Bokuchava explains, involves primarily solidifying the party’s large pre-existing base of loyal voters, and secondly, appealing to the wider pool of opposition-minded voters and trying to win support there. Whilst it’s important to her to maximise specifically UNM votes, Bokuchava insists that her party remains guided by the “overarching national objective” of securing a European future for Georgia. 

No time to lose

Last month UNM and the likeminded Strategy Aghmashenebeli party (along with several non-political representatives from civil society and academia) united to form a new pre-electoral political platform named “Unity for the Salvation of Georgia”. Both parties will run in the autumn under this platform which bares UNM’s trademark electoral number 5. 

“We are the first to announce our unification,” Bokuchava says. “GD is already down in the trenches preparing for E-day and we felt we didn’t have any time to lose.” 

UNM and SA have a history of collaboration and, according to Bokuchava, “have good experience working together”. She highlighted the 2018 Georgian presidential elections, where the unified UNM/SA candidate, Grigol Vashadze, won 37% in the initial round of elections, preventing the Georgian Dream endorsed independent candidate Salome Zourabichvili (who won 38%) from achieving a 50% majority. (Although Zourabichvili did go on to win the presidency in the second round.)

The new platform was met with criticism from Georgian Dream, who claimed Bokuchava had “brought together the old faces of UNM under a new name, attempting to mislead the public ahead of the October elections” (SA leader Giorgi Vashadze, among other platform additions, is a former UNM member). 

When asked how she responds to these accusations of recycling old UNM cadres, Bokuchava told bne IntelliNews that GD has “unleashed” propaganda against UNM, as the main opposition player, for years.

“This is not new to us. No matter what we do, we always become targeted. If we had brought people that had never had any connection to politics then I’m sure that would have been grounds for attack and criticism. I am actually quite unconcerned about what the government [Georgian Dream] has to say at this point,” she says. 

Bokuchava is hopeful the new platform improves UNM’s chances of taking power back from Georgian Dream in the autumn, as opposed to if they were to run individually. 

“I believe absolutely that the next government will be a coalition government, and that it will be a coalition government who take Georgia to the EU. Of course there are difficulties attached to this, it’s not a completely utopian picture, although I think it is very important for Georgia to establish a political tradition of forming coalitions, of building bridges and of compromising in the national and public interests,” she says. 

Crucially, Bokuchava and Vashadze were brought together by their shared belief that the entire Georgian pro-Western opposition should unite on a single electoral list for the upcoming elections. That hasn’t happened so far, largely because the other opposition parties are still suspicious of the UNM over what they regard as its authoritarian turn under its founder and jailed ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili before the party lost power in 2012. 

“Our vision was complete unification”, Bokuchava says, the idea being that “theoretical negatives which may have been attached to each party when running individually are tempered and mitigated” by the “positive effect created by the unity”. In other words, the pros of a united opposition dilute any voter reservations surrounding one particular party or another – the parties all balance each other out. 

“This was one of the many, many arguments why I thought there should have been a unified list but unfortunately there were sceptics from other parties,” says Bokuchava, adding that she and Vashadze “spared no effort” in attempts to achieve their vision of a single opposition union. 

The recent reality of political unions has indeed played out differently: Bokuchava and Vashadze’s “Unity for the Salvation” is one of multiple smaller alliances that have formed within the opposition. In early July, parties Akhali, Droa and Girchi – More Freedom merged to form “The Time For Change” and Lelo for Georgia, Anna Dolidze’s For the People and Freedom Square have also entered into a coalition. 

Unifying force

Rather than try to distance herself from her party’s controversial founder, Bokuchava models her fierce advocacy for unity on the example of Saakashvili himself.

“Saakashvili’s main asset, even back in 2003, was that he really acted as a catalyst and was a unifier. The Rose Revolution became possible because he acted as the unifying figure, bringing together different parties, different generations, different interests, to bring about the most important regime change in Georgia, ushering in an era of reforms that made Georgia as a state functional,”, says the new UNM chair. 

Fast forward twenty years and, for Bokuchava, Saakashvili very much remains a motor for unity and is a source of “a lot of inspiration and confidence” in terms of party affairs – namely UNM’s push for an opposition that heads to the October elections on a unified list. 

“President Saakashvili sees the importance of unity on the opposition front very, very clearly and is a great advocate of unification,”, says Bokuchava.

Protests against the “foreign agent law” passed in May this year kick-started a conversation amongst the opposition on the importance of unification and of not losing opposition votes, Bokuchava explains. Saakashvili, however, “began speaking about this even before the recent protests, which, to me, shows he is in very much touch with the sentiment of the Georgian public, despite being held hostage as a political prisoner of the Ivanishvili regime”, she says.

On his return to Georgia from Ukraine in October 2021 Mikheil Saakashvili was immediately arrested and has since been in prison in Georgia, convicted of abuse of power. 

Bokuchava stressed her moves as UNM chair must reflect Saakashvili’s vision for the party and the upcoming campaign, despite the latter’s distance from his own party,. The reasoning for this allegiance goes beyond Saakashvili’s role as UNM founder and honorary chair – according to Bokuchava, Saakashvili is “the strongest electoral asset the party has” and must be kept at the heart of decisionmaking as “this is what our [UNM’s] electorate expects”. 

Among Bokuchava’s priorities should her party win power is to “put an end to any possible controversy or any unanswered questions [regarding the UNM founder]”. 

“In the 12 years of Georgian Dream rule Ivanishvili has parroted Kremlin propaganda lines, including on accusations against President Saakashvili, and has used prosecutors and judges sanctioned respectively for connections to the Russian FSB and corruption.

This tell me quite clearly that the sentence for Saakashvili was written in the halls of the Kremlin,” Bokuchava says.

In her opinion, Saakashvili’s case signals the “absolutely vital” need in Georgia for judicial reform, namely building public trust in the courts and ensuring judges operate as per the rule of law, as opposed to politicised justice. 

“It is important that whoever is asking the questions is guided by the law rather than by political vengeance. What we have seen since 2012 is political revenge,” Bokuchava says.

As part of these much-needed reforms, Bokuchava highlights “a comprehensive process for verification of the integrity of judges at all levels of the judiciary”, a process which she says Georgian dream has “demonised” and tried to undermine with a campaign of anti-West propaganda. 

Regulatory measures such as this rely on “the involvement of all necessary actors and buy-in from the public,” but Bokuchava is confident a new UNM government will be able to wrap up any outstanding question marks surrounding the Saakashvili case, and simultaneously dig up plenty of dirt on Georgian Dream’s 12 years in office. 

Protecting the votes

A commitment to unity will shape how Bokuchava plays the upcoming elections on all levels: individual, party (UNM), political platform (Unity for the Salvation), and within the entire pro-Western opposition. At the end of June, six Georgian opposition parties (including UNM and SA) signed a Declaration of Unity, outlining their vow to remain united pre and post elections around pro-European goals set forth by President Zourabichvili in her Georgian Charter. After initially being backed by Georgian Dream, Zourabichvili has now moved over to the opposition side.

The six also committed to protecting voters’ voices. Bokuchava hopes that, whilst the complete unification she pushed for has not happened, all the pro-Western opposition parties will help facilitate “practical cooperation and unity, especially when it comes to protecting the votes”. 

Critics argue the main intent behind GD’s passing of the foreign agent law was to help secure a majority for themselves by deterring internal observation of the voting process, as under the new legislation foreign-funded NGOs must either declare themselves and be scrutinised or face heavy fines. Bokuchava, however, doesn’t think this tactic by GD will come to anything. 

“The Kremlin-inspired GD legislators and their patrons, and the Kremlin itself, could not predict the kind of resilience and push-back shown by Georgian civil society. ‘We will not register’, they said, ‘fine us all you want’”, Bokuchava says proudly. “The immediate result that Ivanishvili wanted, to shut down civil society organisations in the run up to the elections, including election observation organisations such as ISFED, will not be achieved.” 

The UNM chair is also optimistic that potential jeopardization of the elections will be mitigated by a “strong presence” of international observation bodies who will accompany local observers. She adds that the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (in which Bokuchava is a member of the Georgian delegation) has ensured a “robust observation mission from the OSCE”. 

Through a combination of cross-party voter protection and local and international scrutiny of the election process, Bokuchava appears confident that GD can and will be prevented from seizing an illegitimate victory. 

“Despite Ivanishvili’s attempts to try to steal the vote, we will make sure that the will of the Georgian people is reflected in the result. We will do everything in our power to do so,” she declares.

The UNM chair also spoke about the crucial task of maximising voter turnout in the autumn, explaining that the opposition needs to win by such a large margin with maximum turnout so as to preclude the government from any opportunity to skew the vote. A small advantage by the opposition (1,2  or even 5%), and the government “will use various levers of falsification, intimidation, pressure, vote buying and voter fraud to manipulate the results”, Bokuchava explains. 

She is optimistic, however, that if UNM is able to gain the trust and support of a large majority of the Georgian voters, then “the government will be defenceless against the will of the people”. 

UNM as, firstly, trustworthy, and secondly, open and welcoming, is the image of her party Bokuchava hopes to communicate to the Georgian public. 

“As the main opposition party in Georgia we most certainly exude a sense of strength, but in addition it is very important to show the public that our door remains open to new ideas and new people.”

Bokuchava, 41, highlights the importance of harnessing the new-found energy of young people in particular, describing Georgian youth as an “invincible force” who, in the recent foreign agent law protests, “set the political agenda of the day”,  to the great surprise of both Georgian Dream and the opposition. 

“We must make sure we convert this energy and this conviction of victory into political energy and electoral processes,” says Bokuchava, adding that she, among other party leaders, bears a responsibility to keep political nihilism at bay by opening her party to youth. “We need to signal to them that they have a stake”, said the UNM chair, “the future of Georgia is theirs”. 

Whilst Bokuchava remains optimistic that an opposition victory can and will be achieved in October, she cannot deny that the idea of a fourth GD term is a real danger. She mentions the consolidation of power and the increasing move towards autocracy as existing symptoms of the ruling party regime, and predicts “further crackdowns on the opposition, the stifling of critical voices, attempts to entirely silence critical media and civil society organisations, squashing and squandering any chance of Georgia ever advancing on the European path”. 

“A GD victory is not a prospect I even want to entertain,” says Bokuchava. “We must jump on the EU bandwagon now, while we can, whilst the window is open, or it will close, and this would be a historic loss for our country which we just cannot afford.”