Opinions #44/24

The October 26 vote in Georgia, won by a party that wants to maintain privileged ties with Moscow, could mark the end of the cycle. It started right in Tbilisi over twenty years ago. It was the time of the Revolution of Roses that led to the departure of Eduard Shevardnadze, the first president of independent Georgia. Shevardnadze was foreign minister under Gorbachev, a man who epitomized the hopeful face of a Soviet Union abroad firmly on the path of reform in the name of glasnost and perestroika. Shevardnadze, as president, also had to contend with pro-Russian Abkhazia in an attempt to keep it within Georgia. Without success. And in 2003, it was Mikheil Saakashvili, his protégé, his justice minister, who raised the streets against him after allegations of fraud in political elections. Saakashvili, who has a Dutch wife and went to graduate school in the United States, had his own “Georgian dream.” Great Georgia beyond Moscow’s orbit, included in the Euro-Atlantic constellation. That is, within NATO and the EU. We know how it ended: with a war provoked by Tbilisi’s attack on South Ossetia and Russia’s subsequent invasion of a large part of the country. French mediation, with Sarkozy as rotating president of the EU, limited the conflict to five days. At least enough to undermine the credibility of the incendiary Georgian president, for whose sake Bill Clinton and John McCain at one point in Washington nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. But an event in the late autumn of 2003 in the former Lenin Square, recently renamed Freedom Square, was a turning point. “A real coup d’état, nothing more than a flowery revolution,” a discouraged Shevardnadze told me a few weeks later. Almost locked up in his hillside residence, the old president was convinced that only his wisdom had avoided the carnage. “The tanks were already at the ready, I was the one who opposed the violent clearing of the square.” The square was occupied day and night by thousands of people. In those days, it was said that this mobilization cost a few million lari (local currency): less than a million dollars to change geopolitics. Nothing compared to the five billion dollars that Victoria Nuland, US policy plenipotentiary for European and Eurasian affairs to various presidents, proudly claimed to have invested in regime change in Ukraine. The fact is that the first of the “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet space started in Tbilisi. Then, a year apart, followed Orange in Kiev, Tulip in Kyrgyzstan, Jeans in Belarus… With the October 26 vote, Georgia returned to the starting point. Or almost. The call to strengthen relations with Europe will not go away by severing relations with Russia. The new Iron Curtain established as a result of the Second Cold War will not see a NATO outpost in the Caucasus. The party, led by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze and inspired by former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, a pro-Russian billionaire, won a broader victory than expected and with less fraud than feared, given the voting methods – each voter’s finger marked in ink, a voting booth with a window so the voter could be seen, an electronic anti-fraud device, cameras at each polling station – they left little room for manipulation. Protests by the pro-Western opposition, although expected and supported from abroad, will not change the basic fact. ISFED, an independent organization that has been observing elections in Georgia for thirty years, recorded sporadic irregularities in some counties, but found no serious irregularities in the vote count. And the OSCE did not find any elements that could invalidate the result announced by the election commission. In anticipation of the second round of presidential elections in Moldova, voting in Georgia may rather indicate a change in dynamics from the previous two years, characterized by international polarization as a result of the escalating conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Then the US elections will soon follow, which will be the real turning point in this dramatic political-military season. However, as we wait to see what course post-Biden will choose, we should note the delegitimization of the UN by the two defenders of the West. First Netanyahu and then Zelensky refused to recognize before the General Assembly and the Secretary-General the role that the international assembly assigns to the UN. Since the United Nations is the only forum in which all countries are represented in one way or another. A forum that should actually be strengthened for a less conflictual coexistence at the international level, as historian Anton Giulio de Robertis explains. Another historian, Thomas Flichy de La Neville, takes us to a segment of the Asian world that, in the shadow of regional powers, is gaining international importance. That Bangladesh, which became one of the most efficient and most exploited factories in the world, spawned a swift and radical revolution at the height of summer. Which led to the hasty flight abroad of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who turned from a recognized leader to a tyrant during her many years in power. She was replaced by a widely recognized figure such as Muhammad Yunus: economist, “banker of the poor,” Nobel Peace Prize winner. And a friend of the United States.