Tbilisi’s Rustaveli Avenue after dark: in late 2024 the site of nightly battles between hordes of anti-government protesters in masks and goggles and riot police armed with tear gas.

Today, demonstrators continue to gather, but their heads are hooded and faces muffled to avoid identification by dystopian-style CCTV cameras mounted all along the wide street in front of the Georgian parliament.

The early months of 2025 have seen the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party change tack. Brutal police crackdowns on pro-EU street protesters have given way to a targeted campaign of repression seemingly intent on throttling every dimension of the Georgian civil resistance movement and consolidating authoritarian rule.

A variety of draconian methods, from illiberal new laws to Orwellian surveillance, look to be collectively aimed at sowing fear, enforcing compliance and crushing political dissent into non-existence.

As authoritarianism crystallises into paralysis at home, Georgian civil society finds itself increasingly isolated from its Western partners, whose attention is firmly fixed on resolving the crisis in Ukraine.

GD, for its part, continues to dismantle long-standing relations with its allies, repeatedly accusing what it terms a “deep state” network of European leaders of plotting to overthrow the Georgian government, install their own loyal agents, and drag the country into conflict with Russia.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s democratic ratings have plummeted, press freedoms have declined, and international and local watchdogs, most recently the Council of Europe Human Rights Commission, warn of a mounting human rights crisis in the Caucasus country.

50 individuals arrested at anti-government demonstrations remain in prison on criminal charges, some as young as 18 – a continual reminder to Georgians of the cost of dissent.

For over 120 consecutive nights, protesters in Tbilisi have been demanding their release, as well as a rerun of the October parliamentary election, in which GD claimed victory amid mass allegations of fraud.

GD’s decision to shelve the country’s EU membership process on November 28, 2024 reneged on the party’s pro-election pledge to pursue a European path and shattered Georgia’s decades’ long commitment to European democratic values.

In the face of the ensuing public backlash, the Georgian authorities have appeared to be solely focused on suppressing dissent, with little real governance taking place.

“Repression has become the only and exclusive policy,” Georgia’s fifth president, Salome Zourabichvili, declared during her recent tour of the Baltics.

Democracy in crisis

Georgian democracy took a massive hit with the botched October election and remains under mounting existential threat as GD continues to undermine democratic institutions.

The Economist Democracy Index ranked Georgia’s democratic nosedive in 2024 as the fourth steepest globally, scoring the country on a par with Russia and Belarus, while the Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy 2025 report downgraded Georgia from electoral democracy to electoral autocracy.

Aside from two loyal splinter groups posing as the “opposition”, GD remains the only party in parliament, though it faces continued allegations of non-legitimacy both at home and abroad.

Since the contested October vote, three opposition factions have revoked their mandates and the fourth continues to boycott every session, essentially leaving GD free to rubber-stamp any proposed changes to the law.

Recent days have brought fresh promises from GD to ban opposition parties from future elections, a move one faction leader described as “a blatant attempt to eliminate political alternatives altogether”.

The recent beating and stripping naked of opposition leader Helene Khoshtaria in police detention signals GD is reverting to humiliation and violence to quell dissenting voices, a tactic Khoshtaria’s colleagues insist is straight out the Kremlin playbook.

Mikheil Kavelashvili, GD’s puppet president who replaced Zourabichvili in December, is in position in Tbilisi’s Orbeliani Palace, green-lighting the ruling party’s consolidation of power.

In a recent conversation with bne IntelliNews, Zourabichvili described Georgia’s dramatic demise as “tragic”, but stressed that it was down to the West to react in the name of democracy.

As she sees it, a new round of parliamentary elections is the only peaceful way forward, and “active diplomatic intervention” the sole way to achieve this.

The fifth head of state has even called the crisis in her country a “strategic test for Europe” to foil Moscow’s plans for domination of the entire Black Sea region and beyond.

With the West so focused on Ukraine it’s unclear how soon foreign mediation could come, though Zourabichvili has frequently reminded European leaders that the fates of Georgia, Ukraine and the wider continent are entwined by a common denominator of Kremlin encroachment.

The US Senate, for its part, recently approved the bipartisan MEGOBARI Act – to loud cheers in Tbilisi. The bill mandates sanctions against top GD officials and pledges support for Georgian protesters’ Euro-Atlantic aspirations.

It now, of course, remains to be seen how much retribution for cold shouldering democracy will get past President Donald Trump.

Public freedoms and human rights under threat

Attacks on individual freedoms appear part and parcel of GD’s consolidation of power.

Fast-tracked legislative amendments have toughened fines and quadrupled detention time for petty offences at protests, provisions the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) has declared breach international human rights laws.

The 50 jailed on criminal charges face long sentences and are repeatedly denied bail by courts that protesters accuse of being loyal “slaves” to the GD government and Russia.

Facial recognition cameras at protest sites scope out individual demonstrators and journalists who are then fined GEL5,000 ($1,800), more than twice the average monthly income, for “blocking the road”.

Local watchdogs warn of serious violations of Georgians’ freedom of assembly and claim such measures aim to intimidate and financially cripple protesters, who, they report, have been fined over $700,000 in total since November.

Accused by the Georgian Prosecutors Office of “encouraging civil unrest”, five public funds which had offered financial assistance to those fined at protests recently had their accounts frozen.

The funds had also been supporting hundreds dismissed from their jobs in ongoing political purges of Georgia’s civil service, including the defence and foreign ministries, which began after staff members signed petitions denouncing GD’s decision to halt EU integration.

Opposition member Natia Mezvrishvili views GD’s oppression of protesters as not simply a “series of isolated human rights violations”, but rather a “state-organised and systemic” campaign orchestrated by a “single mastermind”, billionaire GD founder and Georgia’s de facto ruler, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who Mezvrishvili claims is the “only institution” in Georgia today.

Suffocation of NGOs

A new US-style Foreign Agents Restriction Act (FARA) looks set to replace the controversial “foreign agents” law GD adopted in May 2024 amid huge public backlash.

The existing bill requires foreign funded NGOs and media organisations in Georgia to register themselves as “serving foreign interests”, a label watchdogs argue discredits and stigmatises such organisations.

Critics warn that this tougher update, which GD justifies by claiming is a “direct copy” of the US original, aims to wipe out civil society entirely by imprisoning those who refuse to register.

 “If it’s used against NGOs, it’s no longer the American law – it will be Ivanishvili’s FARA,” stated the director of Georgia’s key election watchdog ISFED, Nino Dolidze, who believes GD’s attempts to crush civil society stem from fear.

Human Rights Watch has urged the parliament to reject the FARA-style bill, declaring that it “violates fundamental human rights norms” and would “further escalate” the existing crisis triggered by the Georgian authorities in recent months.

GD’s FARA has coincided with the freeze of US foreign assistance, leaving many NGOs and media organisations across Georgia starved of funding and unable to plan for the future.

“We’re in a war and we’re blindly trying to survive until tomorrow,” said Tato Mikadze, member of the Civic Movement for Freedom organisation based in west Georgia. “We know GD has no limits.”

War on free media

Simultaneously, new amendments to Georgia’s Law on Broadcasting propose tighter state control by essentially bringing independent media organisations in line with standards predetermined by law and transferring the issue of their regulation to the government.

Claiming it is mirroring UK standards of “due impartiality”, GD is also seeking to restrict foreign funding for Georgian broadcasters so as to ensure citizens’ protection from “misinformation” and “foreign interference”, as the party puts it.

Human rights watchdog Transparency International Georgia, meanwhile, warns the ruling party is working to “weaken or completely eliminate critical broadcasting media”, writing off international freedom of expression standards in the process.

Repression of independent media extends far beyond legal roadblocks, a reality best personified by imprisoned veteran journalist, Mzia Amaglobeli, who faces up to seven years in prison for slapping a chief police officer, a charge GD critics claim is politically motivated and unlawful.

Amaglobeli’s 38-day hunger strike garnered international attention and calls for her release, including from the International Press Institute and now the Clooney Foundation for Justice, which recently announced that its TrialWatch initiative would begin monitoring Mzia’s case.

The targeted violence and harassment independent journalists were subject to at protests throughout December continues. Gela Mtivlishvili, editor-in-chief of online publication Mtis Ambebi, was recently chased down a mountain road by a truck, forced out of his car and beaten by an interior ministry Special Forces officer.

Both this ambush and the assault of Khoshtaria (just the latest in a string of attacks on opposition politicians) appear to indicate GD’s constant readiness to resort to shameless, thuggish violence to silence those they feel threatened by.

“Ivanishvili’s regime fears the power of free speech, and will stop at nothing to shut it down,” three of Georgia’s four major opposition factions declared recently in their joint newsletter.

Dead or dormant?

While she admits GD’s measures have had a “sharp effect”, Mezvrishvili told bne IntelliNews she firmly believes that, “as a rule”, repression induces more protest.

The opposition politician sees value in the nightly blockage of Rustaveli Avenue, even by a few hundred people.

This firm display of continued resistance is both symbolic and inspiring but also “does not portray the [GD] regime strongly to its electorate”, forcing the party to “resort to increasing repression”, Mezvrishvili explained.

Laura Thornton, director of Global Democracy Programs at the American McCain Institute, meanwhile, believes public protests in Georgia have, for now, hit a “dead end”.

“The protesters are very strong and determined, but so is the regime,” Thornton pointed out, and suggested Georgians work to redirect their demands to broader, everyday issues such as wages or corruption in order to garner “mass support” across the country.

For many Georgians, however, there is no way back. Their fight has breached the borders of their own country and morphed into a future-defining geopolitical crusade: Europe vs Russia, democracy vs authoritarianism, freedom vs oppression.

Likening his country’s civil resistance movement to a “dormant volcano”, sociologist Yoga Kachkachishvili recently shared the view that the protests, far from weakening, have entered a “waiting mode”, where a single “trigger” could draw tens of thousands back out onto the streets.

Activist Gocha Gogsadze, however, feels “directly impacted” by GD’s crackdown, and fears the mounting repression is taking its toll.

“The growing threat has already forced many activists and opposition figures to flee the country,” Gogsadze told bne IntelliNews. “The situation is increasingly dangerous, and without decisive action, the repression will only worsen, leaving those who remain to face escalating pressure.”