The men with their mouths sewn shut magnify Georgia’s ‘existential’ election

As four men on hunger strike sit in a tent with their lips sewn shut in Georgia’s sinking village of Shukruti, their cries for help are falling on deaf ears in the country’s capital.

Two hours from Tbilisi, Shukruti is a village near the ore-rich town of Chiatura in Western Georgia, where years of intense mining have caused residential houses to deteriorate and crumble. For years, residents have been asking the government to intervene, hold the mining company accountable and pay them compensation for the damages, to no avail. 

The government believes it’s strictly between the villagers and the mining company — the largest employer in town — to sort it out. 

Although this is not their first time resorting to such extreme measures, the hunger strikers remain hopeful that this time their protest will make a difference, as Georgians head to polling stations next month to cast their votes in a parliamentary election.

The Oct. 26 vote should determine whether Georgians want to be ruled by the Russia-leaning Georgian Dream party, which has run the country since 2012, or by the pro-Western opposition.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili — a critic of Georgian Dream, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze and his government — has dubbed the election “existential.” If the ruling party wins, opposition groups fear Georgia will miss the window of opportunity to join the EU as its accession talks are already frozen due to Georgian Dream’s authoritarian pivot.

But for many Georgians, especially the striking miners, the word existential has a whole different meaning, as they watch their pockets being emptied by the soaring cost of living and their homes falling apart.

Georgian Dream’s Russian pivot

Around 80 percent of Georgians support EU accession, according to a December 2023 poll, and the Georgian Dream party seemed committed to this path for years — until it wasn’t. 

The ruling party started to grow wary of Western partners when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, doubling down on a conspiracy theory that a nebulous “global war party” — referring to Western governments — wants to drag the country into the war.

When the government reintroduced a controversial Russian-style law that labels many civil society groups as foreign agents in April 2024, it became evident that foreign policy would dominate the pre-election campaign.

With the government branding Western allies as warmongers, Georgians are now concerned that their aspirations of joining the EU are in tatters, as the country’s leadership pivots toward Moscow — the country that invaded Georgia in 2008 and still controls 20 percent of the country.

Their fears were further solidified when party supremo Bidzina Ivanishvili launched the Georgian Dream’s election campaign with a vow to outlaw opposition parties. According to Ivanishvili, the United National Movement — the biggest opposition party and Georgian Dream’s chief critic — is a satellite of the “global war party” and therefore should be banned.

The party has also pledged to ban “LGBT propaganda” and to declare Orthodox Christianity as a state religion if they were to gain a constitutional majority in the election, though doing so would limit the Church’s independence from the state. (The Georgian Orthodox Church declined the offer).

Opposition parties have scrambled to join forces, forming several coalitions to compete with Georgian Dream on October 26. 

But have they been suckered into fighting on Georgian Dream’s electoral territory?

“The government hasn’t offered to resolve a single social issue. Instead, they’ve built their campaign around hatred and fear,” said Irakli Kupradze, secretary-general of the opposition coalition Strong Georgia. “A part of the opposition has swallowed this bait and reduced the election only to its geopolitical significance, which we believe is wrong.”

‘Ignored by Everyone’

Many opposition parties have yet to unveil their election programs, but Tina Bokuchava, the chairperson of the United National Movement, has already framed the election as “a choice between Europe and Russia.” 

A core message in her narrative is that the country faces a choice between “affluence in Europe or poverty in isolation.”

In the 2020 parliamentary election, Georgian Dream scored 48 percent of votes, dwarfing United National Movement which came in second at 27 percent. But this year, as the opposition forms coalitions, polling suggests there may not be an outright winner. 

For most Georgians, like the weary villagers in the sunken mining town, bread-and-butter domestic issues are the top priority — not the geopolitical tussle between the West and Russia. 

They just want jobs, inflation brought under control and political stability, according to a recent poll. 

“We are ignored by everyone. Since 2019, we’ve been trying to make the government listen to our concerns, but to no avail. Not a single person has come to our aid. The opposition, too, has its own agenda,” Giorgi Neparidze, a protester from Shukruti, told POLITICO.

Georgian Manganese, their mining employer, has caused huge environmental damage to the area they call home. For this reason, the company has been fined millions of dollars and, in 2016, a court appointed a special manager in the company to mitigate the issue. But since then, not much has changed for the protesters.

For several years now, residents of Shukruti village have been holding demonstrations in makeshift tents. As they blocked the entrance to mines during their protest, Georgia’s Prosecutor’s Office launched a lawsuit against three protesters in July. Neparidze is one of them. If found guilty, he faces up to three years in prison.

Recently, they decided to take their protest to Chorvila — Ivanishvili’s hometown — to draw attention to the issue, but on their way there, they were confronted by a group of people Neparidze claims are affiliated with the ruling party, who barred them from entering the village.

“This election will largely be marked as a geopolitical choice,” said Sopho Verdzeuli, co-founder of the Georgian civil movement Voters Against Single-party Governance.

“But we’re concerned about the lack of substantive discussion [about bread-and-butter issues].”

The protesters now feel they’ve been left to face the Goliath alone as the country’s ruling elites and their opponents wrestle to win the election in a debate centered around issues that can often feel far from their daily struggle.

Asked whether the UNM has paid a visit to protesters in Shukruti, Bokuchava said that while she personally has not, one of the political leaders from their platform has. “He hails from Chiatura and knows local problems very well,” Bokuchava told POLITICO.

Not everybody is convinced that will be enough — for Shukruti’s residents or Georgians facing other economic challenges across the country.

“People need to know how the opposition is planning to rule if they win the election,” said Kornely Kakachia, the director of the Georgian Institute of Politics, a Tbilisi-based think tank. “I don’t believe that people will base their decisions solely on choosing between Europe and Russia.”