In the spring of 2016, an ultra-conservative conclave, styled as the 10th convention of the World Congress of Families, convened in Tbilisi’s Concert Hall. A parade of delegates used the three-day event to rail against Western liberalism’s secular tendencies.
One of the most outspoken orators in Tbilisi was Josiah Trenham, an Orthodox priest from Riverside, California, who derided “tolerance tyrants,” the “lavender mafia” and “homofascists” working to promote LGBT rights. Gay rights activism, he said, was tantamount to“a call for the overthrow of traditional religious and civilizational norms for family, sex and law.” Another participant described “gender ideology” as a “diabolical creation of Marxist philosophy.”
In his keynote speech, Allan Carlson, a co-founder of the congress, conjured a dark image of a global struggle between good and evil, in which the defenders of “the natural family” battle to contain “forces combining revolution with retro-aggression, novelty with depravity, and cries of liberation with a new slavery.” The WCF later adopted a declaration urging governments and international organizations to “cease all propaganda in favor of ‘gender theory’ and ‘sexual orientation,’ which have no basis in biological reality.”
The torrent of illiberal oratory at the congress seemed jarringly out of sync with the public mood in Georgia at the time. Opinion polls showed large majorities supporting membership in the European Union and NATO, and the liberal ideals those institutions embody. The government, dominated then as now by the Georgian Dream party, seemed invested in implementing reforms needed to speed Western integration. The EU in 2017 rewarded Tbilisi’s reformist efforts by granting Georgian citizens visa-free travel privileges to Schengen states.
The WCF’s stated reason for holding a convention in Tbilisi was to open a new front in what participants saw as a global culture war. Georgia, Carlson contended in 2016, was the fulcrum of the “great contest over the human future.” Back then, such rhetoric seemed preposterous. But eight years later, Georgian society is polarized and illiberal forces appear to have the upper hand in an intensifying struggle over the country’s geopolitical direction. With hindsight, the WCF can be seen as an inflection point in Georgia’s post-Soviet trajectory, the moment when those harboring an illiberal vision found their footing and embarked on a long march to political relevance.
Western conservatives were not the only ones advancing this illiberal agenda in Georgia. By the early 2010s the WCF was flush with cash from Kremlin-connected oligarchs Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeyev, both sanctioned for their support of the 2014 separatist movements in Ukraine. As such WCF was part of a Russian network of international organizations pushing for restrictions of LGBT rights. Arguably, WCF became a vehicle for promoting Kremlin’s foreign agenda.
“In EU countries with no significant Orthodox presence, the Kremlin strategy has been to infiltrate Western Christian associations and link them to Orthodox ‘allies’ to fight for a common cause to preserve ‘European civilization,’” according to a 2022 position paper729430_EN.pdf) published by the European Parliament\. “The agenda of this ‘new ecumenical cooperation’ is about ‘traditional values’, the ‘traditional family’, the ‘sanctity of life’ and ‘religious liberty\.’ A key NGO coordinating such links is the World Congress of Families\.”
The seeds of Georgia’s illiberal, far-right movement sprouted after the Georgian Dream coalition gained power in 2012, coupled with the end of Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidential tenure the following year. A democratizer exhibiting increasingly dictatorial tendencies, Saakashvili had kept a tight lid on illiberalism during his presidency. In the years immediately after it gained power, Georgian Dream had little politically in common with nascent right-wing fringe movements, such as the Alliance of Patriots and Georgian March. But Georgian Dream nevertheless found them useful as a means keeping their mutual enemy – the remnants of Saakashvili’s United National Movement – down and out.
A key early figure in illiberalism’s revival in Georgia was Levan Vasadze, a self-styled Orthodox Christian knight who served as the ceremonial host of the WCF in 2016. Educated in the United States and having made a fortune in Russia, Vasadze was a virtual unknown before 2013, when he figured prominently in a riot that marred a gay-rights march in Tbilisi. From that point on, he was an outspoken critic of tolerance.
“My dream is for Georgia to become the first country in the world to write a constitution, in which it is written that human rights are not the main thing,” Vasadze proclaimed in 2017, “the main thing is the obligations of a person to his family and homeland.” He also groused that liberalism had replaced communism as an occupying ideology in Georgia.
Vasadze developed close ties to top clergy within the Georgian Orthodox Church, as well as with Eurasianist ideologue Alexander Dugin, a Russian ultranationalist who has been portrayed as Vladimir Putin’s “brain.” Such relations helped infuse Georgia’s illiberal movement with intellectual heft and spiritual legitimacy. The Georgian Orthodox Church even declared May 17, the day the anti-gay riot in Tbilisi occurred in 2013, as “defense of the family day.”
As elsewhere around the world, the illiberal movement in Georgia gained followers by riding a wave of popular resentment fueled by the 21st century’s wrenching economic and technological changes. Social conservative astroturf movements, with funding from the US, Europe and Russia, played a key role in incubating nativist activists and organizations worldwide, and in setting an anti-gender, anti-human rights agenda. Populist agitators, pushing an ill-defined ideology founded on the perceived conflict between “the people” and “the elite,” portrayed liberal policies advocated by international organizations like the EU and the UN as out of touch with the popular will, and worked to weaken minority rights, the rule of law, and separation of powers.
In a 2018 paper, titled Nativists Versus Global Liberalism in Georgia, political scientist Ghia Nodia characterized the illiberal movement’s ethos as “akin to that of a resistance movement.” Nodia indicated that “nativist civil society” was a byproduct of popular angst about the unfamiliar, rooted in misconceptions about the West and idealized notions of the nation’s traditions. Perhaps the change Illiberals resented the most was how Soviet-era elites had been displaced by educated, westernized technocrats and NGO activists as the main drivers of public policy. “Following the demise of the Soviet order, communism was replaced by the new discourse of democracy and human rights,” Nodia wrote. “Georgian society generally welcomed this change, but few people had a distinct idea of what these norms and institutions actually meant.”
Illiberal actors took advantage of an “imagined disjuncture between Western or global liberalism and authentic Georgian culture and identity,” he added. “Nativists have never presented a single coherent concept of their project, but the most important perceived threats are seen in areas of sexuality and traditional family relations.”
Around the same time as illiberal concepts were starting to gain traction, it grew clearer that Georgia would not receive a long-sought green light for NATO membership anytime soon. At a summit in the spring of 2008, NATO officials proclaimed that Georgia (as well as Ukraine) “will become members of NATO.” But after Georgia’s calamitous five-day war with Russia later that year, followed by Russia’s brazen occupation of Crimea in 2014, NATO’s appetite for enlargement significantly waned. By 2019, Georgian Dream’s pursuit of NATO accession was noticeably losing vigor.
A pivotal moment in Georgian Dream’s geopolitical turnabout was the July 2019 visit of Russian State Duma Deputy Sergei Gavrilov, according to David J. Kramer, the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute. Gavrilov delivered a speech in Russian to a group of lawmakers from predominantly Orthodox countries while sitting in the Georgian Parliament speaker’s chair. The incident sparked a mass protest in Tbilisi.
“The government just didn’t seem to ever get its bearings back in a western orientation,” Kramer said, referring to its actions since the Gavrilov incident. “I think it’s pretty unmistakable that the Georgian Dream has been moving in a Russian direction.”
Far-right political players performed poorly in Georgia’s 2020 parliamentary elections. The Alliance of Patriots garnered slightly over 3 percent of the vote, down from 5 percent in 2016, and Georgian March received less than 1 percent of the ballots cast. But electoral rejection didn’t halt the far-right’s momentum. New parties and movements emerged, including the Conservative Movement Above All, People’s Power and Conservative Moment.
In recent years, Georgian Dream’s rhetoric and actions have increasingly seemed influenced by the illiberal ideas first voiced by Vasadze. Georgia’s break with NATO solidarity burst into the open following Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine in early 2022. Since then, the Georgian Dream government has remained reluctant to support Ukraine. Meanwhile, Georgia has been identified as a key trade conduit that has helped Russia evade Western sanctions.
Georgian Dream’s pivot away from NATO and liberalism is mainly motivated by a desire to cling to power, according to Thomas de Waal, senior fellow with Carnegie Europe. To understand the political trend in Georgia you need to look at another small European country – Hungary, he added. “Georgian politics has been described as pluralistic feudalism,” de Waal said, “you get a choice between parties, all of whom have the ambition to turn Georgia into a one-party state.”
After determining that NATO was unlikely to become their security guarantor, Georgian Dream leaders appeared to decide that illiberal tactics offered the best chance for retaining power. They adopted the political playbook of Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, who started out as a liberal-leaning centrist when he led a Hungarian government in the late 1990s only to be ousted in the country’s 2002 elections. During his years in opposition, Orbán took a hard-right turn, and after regaining the premiership in 2010, he pursued an illiberal agenda designed to keep his Fidesz movement in power, muzzling the press and subjugating the courts.
As Georgia gears up for parliamentary elections in 2024, Georgian Dream finds itself in a tricky spot: a significant majority of Georgians remain ardent supporters of European Union accession, but the government’s illiberal policies have fueled wariness within the EU hierarchy in Brussels. In an assessment issued in early November, the European Commission set conditions that had to be met before Georgia’s accession could proceed, specifically the full implementation of a variety of liberal reforms, including a guarantee of free and fair elections and Tbilisi’s full alignment with EU sanctions on Russia. Georgian Dream’s determination to push through so-called ‘foreign agents’ legislation has only heightened EU and US wariness.
Georgian Dream’s defiance of the EU’s accession conditions poses a significant test of Brussels’ political will. What will the EU do, if Georgia keeps thumbing its nose at Brussels?
“There’s clearly a battle going on within Europe itself, about what it means to be European,” de Waal said. “Georgian Dream is backing this more civilizational, traditional Christian view of Europe rather than a postmodern, progressive liberal view of Europe.”
