Eroding Democratic Checks and Balances: The Georgian Dream’s Path to Power Centralisation

This Article is published in the context of JEF Europe’s Democracy Under Pressure (DUP) Action Week

The year 2012 marked a breakthrough for Georgia, as elections led to a peaceful transition of power in accordance with the Constitution for the first time in its political history. The Georgian Dream party, founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, took office, bringing a renewed sense of confidence and high expectations for the country’s European and democratic future.

The newly elected government appeared genuinely committed to decentralising political power, a persistent trend in Georgian political history, by enhancing the system of checks and balances. To this end, the parliament accelerated the finalisation of the 2010 constitutional reform, which was adopted after the 2013 presidential elections. This latter ushered in a pivotal shift from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary form of government, reducing the president’s powers and redistributing them to the government, which became the sole supreme body of the executive power, and to the prime minister as its head. However, despite initial praise from experts who viewed the transition as a step forward in Georgia’s democratic progress, along with widespread public optimism, the country soon experienced a new wave of democratic backsliding rather than consolidation.

Indeed, a careful analysis of the specific rationalisation mechanisms and the resulting constitutional arrangement introduced by the amendment reveals that this expansion of the government powers has become excessively unbalanced, resulting in an uncontested dominance of the prime minister, as its head, and ultimately affecting the legislative-executive balance of power. The main cause of such centralisation is to be attributed to the inclusion in the Constitution of a non-ordinary formula for the constructive vote of no-confidence. This instrument is termed ‘rationalising’ as it places greater responsibility on parliament and reduces the likelihood of frequent governmental crises.

The procedure that emerged from the new Georgian constitutional dictate is a unicum with no analogies in global constitutionalism. The amended Constitution provides for two-fifths of the members of parliament to raise the question of no-confidence, an unusually high threshold compared to what is typically expected in democratic states that contemplate such an instrument. This first request does not imply the automatic initiation of the constructive vote of no confidence, which involves the appointment of a new prime minister, but requires an additional vote instead. In order to take office, the new prime minister must be supported by half of the members of parliament, a majority that once again exceeds constitutionally recognised standards. Moreover, the procedure, including the request and the actual declaration of no-confidence, must occur within a specific time limit, i.e. no less than 20 and no more than 25 days. Lastly, even if all procedural steps were successfully completed, the president can exercise a veto on the constructive vote of no-confidence, a power never established before and outside of any constitutional logic, granting the president the right to interfere in parliament’s exclusive legislative authority. For the aforementioned reasons, some scholars define the Georgian model of parliamentarianism as super-rationalised, thus oriented towards the “maximal solidity and “permanency” of the prime minister’s position” to the detriment of parliament. While the constructive vote of no-confidence is supposed to ensure a proper separation of powers by respecting parliament’s authorities and duties, the mechanism as conceived undermines its own essence and reverses its effect, protecting the government, even in its unpopular actions, and obstructing meaningful parliamentary scrutiny. The lengthy procedure, along with the stringent quorums and timeframes, not only makes it highly unlikely for this mechanism to succeed in bringing down the government, but it also increases the risk of adverse consequences for parliament, such as dissolution, in the event of failure to meet the procedural requirements, thereby enhancing the prime minister’s leverage over the legislative body.

This constitutional shortcoming was reflected in Georgia’s political landscape in the years that followed, solidifying a balance of power as persistently skewed in favour of the prime minister.

Indeed, under the Georgian Dream’s administration, the political pattern of one-party dominance persisted in both the 2016 and 2024 parliamentary elections, resulting in a parliament that functions as a mere sounding board for the government rather than serving as its counterpart. The only notable change from the past has been the transfer of authority from the president to the prime minister, who has become the leading figure in the current political system. This means that the reform has not differentiated the responsibilities among the constitutional branches, but instead preserved a strongly hierarchical balance by merely altering the apex of the power structure.

The prime minister is now the central driving force upon which all other spheres of power depend, primarily the parliament and the presidency. Indeed, leveraging its ‘supermajority’, in 2018, the parliament adopted a new constitutional reform that further entrenched a parliamentary system, increasingly concentrating power within the government at the expense of the president. This included the abolition of the latter’s direct suffrage, which became effective at the end of 2024, when the presidential term of Salome Zurabishvili expired. The revision stipulates that a 300-member Electoral College will now elect the president. However, experts had already predicted what became evident in the 2024 election of the new president Mikheil Kavelashvili, namely that the ruling party would be significantly over-represented in the Electoral College and that the election of the next president would result from its indirect decision. Hence, while universal suffrage afforded the president a certain degree of autonomy by maintaining his independence from any political body, the new constitutional dictate renders him implicitly accountable to that political faction that elected him, turning the presidency into a potential pawn of the government party in furthering its political agenda.

Overall, Georgian political history reveals a recurring systemic cycle. The democratic renaissance proclaimed by a new leader emerging from a period of crisis and uprisings as a new saviour, capable of turning the country’s fate around, periodically gives way to a regression into a new form of authoritarianism. The enduring nature of a highly centralised regime controlled by the ruling elite was emblematically demonstrated in the results of the October 2024 parliamentary elections, where the Georgian Dream secured a landslide victory, making it evident that the 2012 legislature should be considered more an exception that confirmed the prevailing rule. In addition to the instruments of intimidation and vote manipulation, it is through a considerable array of instruments at its disposal, such as the constructive vote of no-confidence and the indirect election of the president, that the Georgian Dream’s government has progressively built a robust power structure, solidified through these constitutional reforms adopted over the years, that expand the ruling party’s influence over both parliament and the president and politically unify them. Indeed, the distortions identified reveal mostly façade reforms, designed primarily to create an appearance of compliance rather than achieving their objectives effectively and establishing enduring changes in the long term.

Such façade reforms not only indicate a reluctance towards real progress, but rather underscore a persistence of conservatism, embodying the principle of “changing everything so that nothing changes”. In other words, the true motive of the reforms lies not in a sincere desire for democratic improvement, but rather in the political interest of preserving the status quo, understood as the progressive strengthening and consolidation of the ruling party’s primacy.