Savior of Georgia, Russian puppet, philanthropist, oligarch. Bidzina Ivanišvili is referred to by these and many other nicknames. The billionaire, Georgia’s richest man and founder of the ruling party, is rarely seen in public and lately almost exclusively behind bulletproof glass.
However, his presence looms large over this small European country, wedged between Russia and the West, and over the elections that could shape its fate, Reuters writes. Parliamentary elections in Georgia take place this Saturday.
Ivanishvili looks down on downtown Tbilisi from a massive steel-and-glass mansion on a rock that juts 60 meters above the metropolis and includes a helipad. He indulges in exotic passions such as breeding sharks and zebras or collecting rare trees.
Many friends and foes consider the 68-year-old the most powerful man in Georgia, or a gray eminence, even though he hasn’t held public office in more than a decade. He presents Saturday’s election as an existential struggle to prevent the “Party of Global War” in the West from dragging Georgia into a devastating conflict with former ruler Russia, as he says happened with Ukraine.
“Georgia and Ukraine were not allowed to join NATO and were left out,” he said in a rare public appearance at a pro-government rally in Tbilisi on April 29. “All such decisions are made by the Party of Global War, which has a decisive influence on NATO and the European Union, and sees Georgia and Ukraine only as cannon fodder,” Ivanishvili said.
While most of Georgia’s 3.7 million people would like to draw closer to the West by joining the EU and NATO and are largely distrustful of Russia, opinion polls show Ivanishvili’s message resonates with many who want to avoid Ukraine’s fate at all costs.
The man who restored hope
Still fresh in the memory is the 2008 war with Russia over the Moscow-backed separatist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which lasted five days and ended with the defeat of Georgia.
The richest man in Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, at a rally of the Georgian Dream party, which he founded, on April 29, 2024, in Tbilisi. | Photo: CTK / AP / Shakh Aivazov
Oleg Mačavariani’s house is only less than ten kilometers from South Ossetia. The 75-year-old retired civil servant fears a repeat of history should a staunchly pro-Western and anti-Russian opposition come to power. “I think the first thing that will happen is that we will be dragged into a war,” the pensioner fears.
Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party is on course to become the country’s most popular party in the election, polls suggest, although it is likely to weaken nationally compared to 2020, when it won a narrow majority in parliament.
Allies at the highest levels of power speak of Ivanishvili in almost messianic terms. When people lost almost all hope forever, a man appeared to restore it, former two-time prime minister Irakli Garibashvili said after Ivanishvili’s first election victory in 2012, after a year as prime minister.
Garibashvili was among the officials who sang the praises of honorary party chairman Ivanishvili in speeches at the September rally, when – unlike the tycoon – they were not protected by bulletproof glass. Current Prime Minister Irakli Kobachidze said that Ivanishvili sacrificed everything, including his comfort, to get Georgia out of the influence of political enemies.
Ivanishvili spent much of the 1990s in Russia, where he founded banking, metallurgical and telecommunications companies and grew rich in the chaos of the collapse of the Soviet Union. His political opponents portray him as a power-hungry oligarch with a dangerous grip on post-Soviet Georgia. Some call his party the Russian Dream. Some label him an agent of the Kremlin without providing any evidence for this.
“He turned Georgia into a private company that he owns 100 percent,” said Gia Khukhashvili, Ivanishvili’s former top political adviser who helped launch Georgian Dream before they split in 2014, when Khukhashvili accused the billionaire of maintaining power from behind the scenes.
Giorgi Gacharia, who was Georgia’s prime minister from 2019 to 2021 and resigned after accusing Ivanishvili of interfering in government affairs, also joined the criticism. “The consolidation of power is huge,” said Gacharia, who heads the Pro Georgia party, one of the four main blocs of Georgia’s fragmented opposition running in the October 26 election. “There is no longer a single independent institution in this country,” Gacharia said, citing the heads of Georgia’s central bank, the election commission, the Supreme Audit Office and the court as answerable to the tycoon. “All these people are directly connected to Ivanishvili. They are loyal to him,” said the opposition politician.
Decisions praised by Moscow
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ivanishvili has virtually turned away from Georgia’s long-term tilt toward the West, which he himself championed when he was prime minister in 2012 and 2013.
This year, the Georgian Dream government pushed through “foreign agent” laws that require organizations funded with more than 20 percent foreign funding to register and curbed LGBT rights, decisions praised by Moscow and condemned by critics as undemocratic and Russian-inspired.
Those moves, along with intensifying anti-Western rhetoric from Tbilisi, led the US and EU to suspend some aid to Georgia, and the bloc froze the country’s bid for membership.
Giorgi Margvelashvili, Georgia’s president from 2013 to 2018 and a close associate of Ivanishvili during his opposition days and early years in power, said the billionaire appeared genuinely pro-Western when he was on the front lines of politics. He described him as a calm, strategic thinker who sought a balance between pro-Union and pro-Alliance politics and the imperative not to provoke the big northern neighbor.
According to Margvelashvili, however, a new hostility appeared in Ivanishvili’s anti-Western rhetoric after the start of the war in Ukraine, a shift that he says is completely out of line with his character. “We can only speculate what drove Bidzina Ivanishvili into such a political mess,” he noted. “A sudden 180-degree change in rhetoric is not his style,” Margvelashvili added.
Video: We have to return a blow with a blow, analyst Votápek comments on relations between Russia and the West (October 23, 2024)
Spotlight moment: We must return a blow with a blow, comments analyst Vladimír Votápek on relations between Russia and the West | Video: The Spotlight Team