Last Wednesday, the European People’s Party, which I am a member of, hosted a group conference in Brussels concerning political developments in Georgia. Nestled in the Caucuses with a population of 4.5 million, Georgia serves as a European gateway to Caspian energy resources. Politicians in both Brussels and Tbilisi have pushed for Georgian EU membership in the European Union, as well as NATO. Georgia seems to have been, in many respects, a post-Soviet success story: it made rapid political and economic gains after a peaceful “Rose Revolution” in 2003. However, the political situation is complicated by the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and the fact that Russian forces that have occupied northern Georgia since a war triggered by Ossetian separatism in 2008.

The conference concerned the aftermath of last October’s Parliamentary elections, in which the Georgian Dream party won an upset victory bringing Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili to power, displacing the allies of current President Mikheil Saakashvili. Saakashvili has ruled Georgia since the 2003 revolution, but he is now a lame duck President until his term ends this October. Prior to the 2012 Parliamentary elections, Georgia adopted a new constitution that will shift power from the Presidency to the Parliament at the end of Saakashvili’s current term. Saakashvili’s party, the United National Movement, is an observer member of the EPP, and guests at the conference came to express their dismay over politically-motivated prosecutions of UNM politicians by the new government.

The highest-profile arrest was of former Prime Minister and Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili. It is true that there are serious problems with Georgia’s judicial system, which Merabishvili was responsible for, and a scandal involving torture and abuse in Georgian prisons was partly responsible for Georgian Dream’s October Surprise. However, Georgia under Saakashvili has made truly impressive leaps forward in eliminating Soviet-era corruption and police brutality, despite little progress prior to the 2003 revolution. The architect behind these changes, which astounded international observers, was Merabishvili.

The EPP’s guests, which included the head of Georgia’s National Security Council, the Parliamentary Minority Leader, and the mayor of Tbilisi, stressed that the prosecution of former government officials itself is not a problem. It is the nature of the prosecutions which they claim is anti-democratic. Giorgi Ugulava, the aforementioned mayor, described how local politicians have been coerced into changing party affiliation or leaving power by the national government, regardless of any wrongdoing. Davit Bakradze, the Minority Leader, described how numerous politicians have been blackmailed by the police, and told that whether they would be prosecuted for alleged crimes depended on how they voted in Parliament. Ivanishvili has even suggested publically that the opposition’s “rhetoric” was linked to “queues at the prosecutor's office.” Some arrests have violated Georgian legal standards concerning pre-trial detention, and some politicians are being hit with a suspicious revolving-door of charges: as soon as they are cleared of one suspected crime, they are accused of a completely different one.

There are serious geopolitical ramifications to this domestic drama. Saakashvili had a very plainly pro-Western foreign policy; Ivanishvili is ostensibly pro-Western, but has taken a conciliatory tone towards Russia. Russia has responded to Saakashvili’s overtures by moving its occupation line deeper into Georgian territory, to the detriment of Georgian civilians living outside the separatist regions, and has used the political change as an opportunity to infiltrate Georgia’s security apparatus. Ivanishvili is a man with his own agenda, not a Russian stooge— as even Bakradze attests— but Russia is taking advantage of him, and his coalition contains significant anti-Western, pro-Russian forces.

NATO, the European Union, and the United States have already made public statements calling for the trials of Merabishvili and other politicians to be transparent. However, so far these appeals have changed little, and Ivanishvili may act with more impunity after the Presidential elections. Giga Bokeria, head of the National Security Council has argued that a stronger message from the European Union and United States could moderate the government’s behaviour before serious long-term damage is done to Georgian democracy. At the moment a pro-Western policy is still popular in Georgia, but the European Union should exploit that window of opportunity before it closes.