Both sides in Georgia look to Trump administration for boost
Which side will get to Trump first?

While many in the United States worry Donald Trump’s presidency will be bane for American democracy, at another end of the world, there are high hopes Trump can be a boon for the Georgian variant.
If there was one foreign country truly looking forward to the start Trump’s presidency, it was Georgia. Both the nation’s increasingly repressive leadership and the people fighting against it listened carefully to Trump’s inaugural address, hoping to tease out hints about Washington’s future policies for their country and the Caucasus region more broadly.
Having diametrically different expectations, both sides hope to gain from Trump’s leadership. Anti-government Georgians, who are contending with an ongoing cycle of police violence and arrests, hope that the Trump-led United States can put the brakes on the ruling Georgian Dream party’s move to isolate the country from the West and build an authoritarian system in the country.
“If he [Trump] does not do it for our sake, I think he will do it for the sake of the American interests,” said a young protester, who watched Trump’s swearing-in ceremony on his phone at anti-government rally in the center of Tbilisi.
American interests in Georgia have taken a beating under Georgian Dream, which is led by oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who has pursued closer economic ties with China and has been accommodating Russian interests in the region.
In its final days and months, the Biden administration imposed sanctions and other punitive measures on Ivanishvili and his government for a brutal crackdown on protesters, harassment of the civil society and demonization of the US as a global warmongering power. Washington has also suspended long-time strategic partnership with its former ally.
Georgian opposition politicians and the protesting part of the public hope that, as far as Georgia is concerned, Trump will pick up where Biden left off. To make sure he does, Salome Zourabichvili, the president and effective leader of resistance to Ivanishvili, traveled to Washington for the inauguration to cement American support for her cause of getting rid of Ivanishvili through snap election.
Notably, Zourabichvili was the only Georgian representative invited to attend the inaugural celebrations.
“I used this opportunity to convey the Georgian people’s urgent plea to key policymakers in Trump’s administration: the need for new, free, and fair elections,” Zourabichvili tweeted from DC. (Ivanishvili and his Georgia Dream party replaced Zourabichvili with a more loyal president late last year, but much of Georgian society still views her as the legitimate president and accuses Georgian Dream of stealing last year’s elections and violating a constitutionally prescribed commitment to seek membership in the European Union).
On the obverse side, Ivanishvili and his Georgian Dream party hope that Trump is a man they can work with, believing he will not pay attention to developments in Georgia, thus leaving incumbent authorities to cement themselves in power.
“My heartfelt congratulations to President Trump on his second term as President of the U.S.A. His leadership should promote global peace and strengthen Georgian-US relations,” said Irakli Kobakhidze, the prime minister and ardent loyalist of Ivanishvili.
Georgian Dream, in fact, has invested heavily in courting Trump. Dropping the original embrace of liberalism, Georgian Dream reinvented itself as conservative group in recent years, taking right-wing stance on gender, LGBTQ rights and religion. The party participated in conservative conferences hosted by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and attended by Trump.
“Georgian Dream has tried to claim ideological affinity with Trump and conservatives and has been banking on his victory in the elections,” commented George Mchedlishvili, associate professor of foreign policy at the European University in Tbilisi.
As Tbilisi-Washington relations plummeted last year amid Georgian Dream-led attacks on critical media, civil society groups and the opposition, party leaders promised Georgian voters, who are predominantly pro-Western in their views, that bilateral relations would improve under Trump. Georgian Dream suggested that Hungary’s Orban, who has earned Trump’s praise in the past, was going to help settle disagreements with Washington.
Working against this expectation is the fact that there appears to be a bipartisan American anger toward the Ivanishvili government. President Zourabichvili went to Washington at the invitation of Congressman Joe Wilson, R-SC, who has been actively campaigning against Georgian Dream’s controversial rule. Other prominent Republicans, including Senator James Risch, R-ID, have also frequently criticized Ivanishvili.
All of this is feeding the hopes that the Trump administration will stay the course toward Georgia and pressure the Ivanishvili government to agree to a snap parliamentary election. But there are skeptics.
“There is optimism in the street of Tbilisi because a senior GOP house member [Joe Wilson] has been advocating loudly on Trump’s second favorite social media platform [X],” commented Luis Navarro, former director of the National Democratic Institute’s chapter in Georgia. But he cautioned against making assumptions when it comes to Trump’s outlook on Georgia and other Caucasian states.
A strong supporter of Biden, Navarro said that Trump could reverse policies toward Georgia just to spite the last administration. Trump’s past relationship with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and contrarian foreign policy messaging also leave lots of room for uncertainty, he said.
While not particularly hopeful, Mchedlishvili does not rule out that the Trump Administration will take a tough stance toward Ivanishvili’s government out of a desire to protect American interests in the region. But he said that “it might boil down to who proves to be more successful in reaching out to Trump on behalf of Georgia, team Joe Wilson or team Viktor Orban.”
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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