Georgia: President provokes Armenian ire with perceived ‘xenophobic’ comments
Controversy underscores sensitivities surrounding ethnic identity in local politics.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili’s fiery rhetoric in denouncing the incumbent Georgian Dream party for rigging the recent parliamentary vote has had unintended consequences, igniting a brushfire in neighboring Armenia. Social media in Armenia is ablaze with criticism of Zourabichvili for perceived “xenophobic” comments relating to the October 26 elections.
Zourabichvili has led the opposition challenge to the official election results, which showed Georgian Dream won 54 percent of the votes, good for 89 of the 150 seats in the next parliament. She has repeatedly insisted the election was “stolen” by Georgian Dream. On October 29, in an interview with the Associated Press, Zourabichvili described one of the allegedly improper practices employed by Georgian Dream as an “Armenian carousel,” in which one individual votes several times using fraudulent identification.
The comment caused a storm among Armenian social media users, who saw the term as a general characterization that belittles Armenian democratic practices as inferior to Georgia’s. Some called the president’s comments xenophobic or “Armenophobic.”
Political analyst Tigran Grigoryan wrote on X that Zourabichvili’s comments were not only misguided but inaccurate. “The irony of Zourabichvili’s comments about the ‘Armenian carousel’ is that even the last pre-Velvet Revolution parliamentary elections in Armenia in 2017 were arguably ‘cleaner’ than the recent elections in Georgia, especially the most recent one,” Grigoryan wrote.
Versions of the carrousel technique have been widely used in all sorts of elections, such as recently in Russia and Serbia.
Election results show that Georgian Dream captured large majorities of the vote in areas predominantly inhabited by ethnic Armenians and Azeris. The tendency of minorities in Georgia to go for the incumbent party is well established, as is the use of administrative means to achieve desired results. A 2021 research paper produced by the Georgian Social Justice Centre stated that “nefarious practices for achieving high results were used by almost all previous governments.” The paper went on to attribute the consistently large voting majorities in predominantly minority areas for the incumbent party to a variety of factors, including “the low political awareness of non-dominant ethnic groups, their weak participation in public life, and even their lack of knowledge of the state language.”
According to the 2014 Georgian census, 13 percent of the population is non-Georgian, with Armenians comprising 4,5 percent. Politically, Armenians are underrepresented, as the projected Georgian parliament is not likely to have an ethnic Armenian member.
Zourabichvili’s comments also have brought to the forefront the issue of ethnic identity in Georgian politics. Spreading rumors about a candidate’s ethnic origins, or otherwise suggesting that he/she is not sufficiently Georgian, has been a common practice in Georgian politics, used by politicians to reduce the stature of their political opponents in the eyes of the overwhelmingly Georgian electorate. One high-profile target of such skullduggery was former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who went so far as to take a DNA test to “prove” his pure Georgian origins after he faced political sniping for being married to a foreigner.
During the just-completed elections, a prominent opposition leader, Mamuka Khazaradze, was subjected to what OC Media characterized as “Armenophobic” treatment at the hands of a pro-government television channel. At one point, a reporter asked Khazaradze if he was concealing Armenian heritage, which Khazaradze denied. “If one of my ancestors were Armenian or from another brotherly nation, I would openly and proudly acknowledge it,” he stated later.
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