Nations in Transit 2010
Georgia’s journey toward democracy started in the late 1980s and went through several major hurdles after the country gained independence in 1991. The civil war and ethnic conflicts shaped a Georgian “failed state” in the early 1990s. The ethnic wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia subsequently grew into the Russian-Georgian conflict that reached its peak in August 2008. The country’s relative stabilization under President Eduard Shevardnadze from the second half of the 1990s was stopped by an emerging corrupt and inefficient hybrid political system.
Then in 2003, Georgia’s population seemed to “awaken” with the Rose Revolution: The new government of President Mikheil Saakashvili launched profound reforms in almost all fields of the public and private sectors. Yet the failure of the government to engage the political opposition led to street rallies during the autumn of 2007, culminating in dispersed demonstrations and closure of oppositional television stations. Followed by the early elections of the president and Parliament, the November 2007 events marked a significant setback for Georgia’s democracy. The August war in 2008 further contributed to internal political crisis.
A new political crisis unfolded in 2009. From April to late June, a handful of opposition parties organized protest rallies picketing parliamentary buildings, the president’s office, the public broadcaster’s building, and closing main streets in downtown Tbilisi. The opposition demanded the resignation of the president and new national elections. With some exceptions, both the government and the opposition restrained from violence. President Saakashvili reiterated his offer from the previous year to launch a second wave of democratic reforms: a state commission was created to draft a new constitution, a working group was set up to elaborate a new election code, and local elections were slated for spring of 2010. Further, steps were announced to increase the independence of the media and the judiciary, though by the end of the year it remained unclear to what extent the government would be willing to implement these and other reforms.
National Democratic Governance. The year started with protest rallies organized by the opposition that signaled a political crisis in the country. Both the government and the opposition managed to overcome the crisis without excessive use of force, and several meetings took place between the president and representatives of the opposition. Although no remarkable results were achieved, there was a noticeable change in the political discourse. A state commission including the parliamentary minority and nongovernmental groups was created to draft a new constitution, and a working group with even broader political participation developed improvements to the electoral legislation. A mutiny in a battalion of the Georgian army raised questions about the effectiveness of civilian control over the military. Along the conflict zones a number of kidnapping cases kept the situation strained but without major complications. Georgia’s national democratic governance rating remains at 6.00.