After the collapse of the Soviet Union the only thing almost all the former republics and vassal states wanted to do was join the European Union. It was a no brainer. Access to the rich EU markets and billions of euros in transformation funds guaranteed not only prosperity, but the option of leaving to work in countries like Germany if your government didn’t get its reform act together fast enough.

Now EU membership has lost its appeal. A referendum on joining the EU in Moldova was supposed to be a shoo-in. It passed by the narrowest of margins. The Georgian general election was supposed to be a choice between East and West. West lost and the Georgian Dream (GD) victory was a vote to maintain relations with Russia.

The knee jerk reaction has been to blame Russian interference – both Moldovan President Maia Sandu and Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili have accused Russia for their respective disappointing results. However, neither have offered any evidence.

In a LONG READ bne IntelliNews sent our reporter Ailis Halligan on a tour of Georgia’s regions and she found no evidence of Russian interference at all.

So what is going on? In short: its complicated.

Georgia held a crucial election on October 26 that saw the ruling GD returned to power with 54% in a controversial result, with the opposition only scoring 37%. The opposition has rejected the result and will call a second mass demonstration tonight, which they hope will turn into a Maidan-style tent camp, in a bid to overturn the results.

A strong showing in Georgia’s regions proved to be key to GD’s victory so oura correspondent toured the country to find out what actually happened.

The main takeaways are:

• GD made heavy use of its “administrative resources” to boost its result, stuff ballots, steal identities and buy votes amongst other things;
• but GD has genuine support amongst most regional voters, especially in the ethnically autonomous regions, enough to bring it close to a majority;
• Halligan could find no evidence of Russian interference in the regional vote on the ground whatsoever;
• the opposition is strong in the cities, but failed to campaign in many regions, handing GD an easy win in much of the country; and
• the opposition remains fragmented with no obvious leader, which also hurt their cause.

Was the Georgian election stolen? Hard to say. While GD clearly had a lot of support, the result was so close to 50% that it's difficult to know if the obvious manipulation of the vote was big enough to make a substantial difference to the end result. There are claims that GD injected 300,000 votes into the count, which would have left them with less than 50% and that would have caused problems, giving the opposition at least the power to block legislation. But with 54% and a clear majority now GD has a free hand to pass almost any law it likes.

The election has been sold as Georgia’s choice between East and West, but what most of the coverage misses that most Georgians want both. Russia is Georgia’s main trade and investment partner and long the country of choice for any Georgian looking to migrate to find better paid work. Without EU membership, for most Georgians the EU remains a mere promise. For Moldovans, who have already been granted EU visas and work permits, the deal is far better, which makes the almost rejection of the referendum far more surprising.

What has changed? EU membership has lost its sparkle. Is Europe losing its appeal or is it Russia that is becoming increasingly attractive? You can cut it up both ways. But one of the salient points is that the would-be members have never been interested in the “values” part of the deal and see the need to adhere to them simply as an annoyance that has to be tolerated if you want access to the transformation grants.

No where is this clearer than with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s flirting with Russia, but Poland was a good example too when it ignored objections to Law and Justice's (PiS's) proposed judicial reforms. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk was elected in a key election, but since then he has struggled to carry out the pro-EU agenda that he promised in a story that is very similar to, but less dramatic than, that of Georgia and Ukraine.

And that is before you get into the rise of the right across the EU, such as the recent AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) victories in Germany’s regional elections.

Another factor is the EU is in serious economic trouble and no longer the prosperous powerhouse it was in the 1990s. In those days the EU economy was bigger than that of the US by a third ($9.2 trillion vs $6 trillion). Today it is third smaller than that of America’s ($18.3 trillion vs $27.4 trillion).

As bne IntelliNews has reported, the sanctions' boomerang effect means that most of Europe is in, or going into, recession and is simply not as rich as it once was. At the same time Russia is booming. It has overtaken both Germany and Japan to become the fourth largest economy in the world in adjusted terms. Four out of the top five global economies are now BRICS economies, with most of the leading emerging markets rising in the rankings and most of the developed world economies falling.

Jobs in Russia are abundant and real wages are at an all-time high. Everyone in Georgia has a friend or relative working in Russia and they are well aware of this story. Emerging Markets (EMs) are flocking to join the new BRICS+ club, with 40 counties in the ante-room and the group is looking increasingly attractive to residents of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). While joining the EU still makes sense to those in the CIS, they also don’t want to cut themselves off from the increasingly dynamic East. They want both, but are being forced to choose.

The EU is faltering to the point where French President Emmanuel Macron warned the whole EU programme “can die in two years” in an alarmist speech in April.

Macron was referring to the fact that Europe is falling behind the US and China, in a precursor to the Draghi report that detailed the same. But the problems go much deeper than that, as reported by bne IntelliNews. Europe is losing its competitive edge to the whole of the developing world due to a toxic cocktail of lack of innovation, lack of investment, over-regulation and costs associated with cutting itself off from Russia’s essential imports.

The geopolitical context has changed dramatically, also blackening the EU’s image. The EU has always sold itself as the grown-up in the room, adhering to UN Charter, human rights, the “international rules based order” and democracy. But its military support for Ukraine and its blatant acquiescence to the US support of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and Lebanon has made it look hypocritical. To countries in Africa, for example, it looks like more of the same old colonialism they suffered from for centuries. In Eastern Europe, the EU comes off as a US lapdog and its pressure to sanction Russia, the long standing business partner for most of the countries in the region, makes zero economic sense. For example, I met once with the head of Georgia’s wine growers association who told me they tried to switch exports from Russia to the EU following the 2008 war, but it failed to work and today most of Georgia’s wine is back where it always was: being exported to the vast Russian market.

In a second piece bne IntelliNews explored what has gone wrong with this EU deal. GD successfully painted it as a member of the "Party of War". From the outside, Georgian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili’s speech in April introducing this idea comes over as an unhinged rant, but from the streets of Tbilisi it doesn’t sound that crazy as all.

The US has attempted to polarise the world into the West vs Russia/China, and the EU has happily gone along with this under the leadership of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who is one of the biggest Russian hawks on the continent and most ardent supporters of Israel, to the point where her entire staff went on record to complain about her bias.

In what should be dubbed the “Serbian model”, many CIS countries want to follow the path blazed by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic where they refuse to join the sanctions regime, are maintaining their trade relations with Russia, but still want to join the EU. For most of the would-be BRICS+ members, they actually want to sit on the fence and stay out of the fight completely.

We have a piece on our site today saying that Russia was “disappointed” that Turkey is still supplying Ukraine with arms, but at the same time it is selling Russia butter, which is currently in short supply. Slovakia, a nominal Russian friend in the EU, has also been supplying Ukraine with arms.

On balance, the Georgian election was held in a toxic environment and cannot be deemed “free and fair”, but the result seems representative and GD's victory is as much due to the failures of the opposition as to the machinations of Georgian Dream and a massive loss of EU prestige.

Russian interference

The opposition have blamed the election result on “Russian interference” but Zourabichvili specifically admitted that there is no evidence of that whatsoever.

Our investigation found no evidence of Russian interference in the regions either. The opposition’s defeat seems to be a mix of GD jiggery pokery, plus use of its administrative resources, but also a failure of the opposition to offer anything at all to the regional residents.

Blaming Russia has become the adjustable monkey wrench of geopolitics. It can be changed to fit all scenarios. Georgia’s opposition needs the support of the EU to pressure GD to agree to a compromise like a rerun of the elections, the introduction of a technocratic temporary government, which has been suggested, or just a rerun. Zourabichvili is hoping to tap the anti-Russia sentiment to rally strong international support for the opposition and the usual suspects like the Baltic States have quickly lined up. But notably, many of the EU leaders have held off on opening condemning the elections; only 15 out of the 27 members signed a letter condemning the elections as fixed.

While it’s pretty certain that Russia did spend some money on pushing its agenda in Georgia, it was not decisive. Moreover, supporting your cause in another country is par for the course. It is an underreported fact that there are hundreds of Western-backed NGOs in Georgia promoting “democracy” which seems to be normal. Except the GD sees this as “interference”.

Prior to the elections the authorities raided and closed down the Washington-based Atlantic Council’s office, confiscating computers and paperwork. Nominally there to promote democracy, the Atlantic Council counts amongst its donors Nato, the US Department of Defence, Lockheed Martin, JPMorgan, several Arab governments and a number of big Ukrainian oligarchs amongst others – hardly bastions of democracy.

This is an old problem. Westerners say they have every right to promote “democracy” in Emerging Markets; the local authorities' frame is promoting “your model” on “our country”. This is the basis of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s NGO law, which has been copied by GD, but the line between “supporting” democracy and “interfering in domestic politics” is pretty fuzzy and the NGOs in Georgia clearly all do have a political agenda to some degree or other.

Putin has repeatedly said that the Russian law is based on a US law, where it is also required to seek permission and register if you want to set up an NGO in America that has a political agenda. Still, no one would be naïve enough to suggest Russian “support” for Georgia’s electoral process has been done for purely altruistic purposes and at least some of the Georgian NGOs are just working for the common good.