With the holiday season wrapping up, attention in Georgia is once again fixing on the country’s political standoff between the Georgian Dream-dominated government and its opponents.

Salome Zourabichvili, who asserts she remains Georgia’s legitimate president, opted to vacate the presidential palace in late December to avoid a direct confrontation with her Georgian Dream antagonists. Having served as the chief catalyst for opposition to Georgian Dream’s efforts to alter the country’s geopolitical course, Zourabichvili is striving to remain a relevant political actor.

A few days after leaving the palace, Zourabichvili stood alongside protesters during New Year’s Eve festivities. “2025 will be a truly victorious year,” she said in an address that evening. Government opponents assert the ruling party engineered an illegitimate victory in October’s parliamentary election, and are calling for new elections.

“It remains to be seen whether [Zourabichvili] will manage to be first among equals of the opposition,” Kornely Kakachia, the director of the Georgian Institute of Politics, said in an interview. He explained that the key players in the protest movement opposing Georgian Dream are civil society activists and young people, not opposition politicians.

Under the circumstances, Kakachia said Zourabichvili would need to shed her presidential persona and create “some sort of new role” to maintain legitimacy as the symbolic leader of protests, particularly for Western observers.

“The major issue here will be what the West will decide and how they will see [Zourabichvili’s] role, especially the United States,” Kakachia added.

Since the protests intensified in late November, the opposition movement has drawn support from the United States and European Union, which have sanctioned Georgian leaders for halting the country’s constitutionally mandated efforts to integrate with Western political and economic institutions. The US and EU stance could shift, however, in late January when Donald Trump returns to the US presidency. 

At this point, Georgian Dream’s strategy for handling anti-government protests seems to be running out the clock. Georgian Dream officials have publicly stated that they are waiting for Trump’s inauguration on January 20, believing he will end the “practice of blackmail by certain European politicians and officials,” according to Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze. 

Independent observers, however, suggest Georgian Dream leaders are miscalculating if they think Trump will come to their rescue. The Trump administration will likely be “inactive” in the South Caucasus, an expert on Georgian politics told Eurasianet shortly after the election. At the same time, there are bipartisan voices in Washington pushing for a strong response to Georgia’s democratic backsliding.

On January 3, lawmakers reintroduced the so-called MEGOBARI Act, which would pave the way for fresh sanctions on government officials. This comes after the US already sanctioned Georgian Dream’s leader and honorary chairman, Bidzina Ivanishvili, in late December.

One of the bill’s sponsors, Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican, is an outspoken critic of Georgian Dream and maintains that Zourabichvili is still the “legitimate” president. In a late-December interview with the Georgian bureau of RFE/RL, Wilson rejected the ruling party’s assumption that incumbent authorities in Tbilisi will find common ground with the Trump administration. 

“I think they have a completely wrong idea about Donald Trump,” Wilson told RFE/RL. “He is a supporter of freedom and democracy and supports leaders like President [Zourabichvili], who is speaking out against the war criminal Putin. Trump is a proponent of negotiations [with other countries], but when he sees that a deal cannot be made, he acts decisively.”