Political Tremors in the Caucasus
There’s a distinct whiff of desire for political change wafting
through the Caucasus.
Foreign Policy
MARCH 8, 2013
BY THOMAS DE WAAL
How do you renovate a house when people are shaking the foundations?
This is the question facing Vladimir Putin’s Russia as well as the
three countries of the South Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and
Georgia. In each place, apparently secure governing regimes have faced
or are facing revived forms of public protest.
Each of these countries experienced mass political turbulence in the
1990s, but for years it looked as though people had lost faith in
public engagement and were content to tolerate any ruler who
guaranteed a modicum of stability. That is no longer the case: After a
period of dormancy, politics is back.
In Georgia, President Mikheil Saakashvili surrendered most of his
powers when last October’s election unexpectedly went against him —
although he is continuing the political fight within the system. Now
the country under the spotlight is tiny Armenia. The country held a
presidential election on February 18 in which serving president Serzh
Sargsyan was elected to a new five-year term. An easy victory for
Sargsyan appeared pre-ordained as two other presumed rivals dropped
out of the race. But in the last two weeks of the campaign, opposition
candidate Raffi Hovannisian, independent Armenia’s first foreign
minister, surged forward.
On polling day, Sargsyan was declared the winner with 59 percent of
the vote. Hovannisian was given an official vote of around 37 percent
and declared to have won the poll in the country’s second and third
cities, Gyumri and Vanadzor.
In effect, the country’s many discontented have woken up — but too
late to make a difference on the election itself. Had the campaign
lasted two weeks longer it is quite possible that Hovannisian’s
momentum would have carried him into a second round run-off.
As it is, world leaders, including President Obama, have now
congratulated Sargsyan on his victory. The State Department
characterized the election as “generally well-administered and
characterized by a respect for fundamental freedoms, including those
of assembly and expression.”
Armenia’s problem was not so much election day as the playing field
itself: A media heavily controlled by the government, local officials
serving the narrow ruling elite rather than the state as such. The
head of the OSCE election observer mission, Heidi Tagliavini, picked
up on this when she commented on “the blurring of the distinction
between the state and the ruling party.”
Raffi Hovannisian is a decent man, unsullied by the corrupt practices
of post-Soviet politics. But he is also a California-born outsider
whom few imagined could be president of Armenia. Evidently, he has
mobilized a protest vote that is bigger than himself.
Hovannisian himself has not recognized the result, and he has been
surprisingly effective at organizing mass rallies across the
country. But it is hard to see how he can prevail in the short term
against a president who now has international legitimacy and controls
all the levers of power in Armenia.
Over the longer term, however, the president has a problem. Opinion
surveys show high levels of discontent in Armenia about corruption,
poverty, and abuse of power. This manifests itself in mediocre
economic performance and a continuing brain-drain from
emigration. Sargsyan is a man of consensus who likes at least to
listen to his opponents. If he does not want a very long and bumpy
second term, he must now think about what steps he can take that will
meet the population’s discontents half-way — while he knows that
tinkering with the system may end up undermining his own authority.
As president of a nation whose compatriots are scattered across the
world, Sargsyan also faces the challenge of continued competition with
the Armenian diaspora. The websites of the two main diaspora
organizations in the United States, the Armenian Assembly and the
ANCA, are conspicuously silent about the once-in-five-years election
in their homeland. A popular U.S. Armenian singer, Serj Tankian,
wrote a public letter to Sargsyan in which he said that “the avalanche
of people suffering under your rule due to corruption and injustice is
tipping the scale for us all.”
If there is a lesson from Caucasian politics over the past year, it is
that public opinion is not a monolith but a wave. A mood of discontent
can build momentum suddenly, as if from nowhere. An incumbent commands
loyalty by default, but once his power trembles, he can be swept
away. This is what happened in Georgia last fall, but did not quite
happen in Russia or in Armenia (where a month before polling day
Hovannisian was scoring only 10 percent in the polls).
Azerbaijan is by far the wealthiest of the three South Caucasus
states. It has increased international standing and is currently a
non-permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. It is also the
least democratic of the three countries: Systemic opposition to
President Ilham Aliev has all but disappeared in the past decade.
Azerbaijan is also insecure. In part that is because of an unenviable
geopolitical situation. Iran to the south is an intensely unfriendly
neighbor. Relations with Russia have fluctuated since the end of the
USSR and are now in a new downturn, following a row over the
Russian-operated Gabala radar station, where Aliev has essentially
evicted the Russians after Moscow refused to meet his demands for
higher rent. To the west is the unresolved conflict with Armenia,
which has left one seventh of the country’s de jure territory under
Armenian enemy control for almost 20 years.
Its newfound wealth also comes almost exclusively from oil and
gas. This is leading to a problem that Putin encounters in Russia, as
some segments of the population no longer seem prepared to accept the
bargain of “we give you higher standards of living, you let us rule
the country unchallenged.”
The last few months in Azerbaijan have seen a series of protests by
shopkeepers, the families of conscript soldiers, and citizens in the
town of Ismayili, who are angry at their mayor. An exiled university
rector released sensational tapes alleging corruption and the selling
of parliamentary seats. Two opposition leaders, Tofiq Yaqublu and
Ilgar Mammadov, were arrested. A venerable writer, Akram Aylisli, who
had dared to publish a novel in Russia that described the sufferings
of Armenians, was publicly vilified, threatened, and stripped of his
state awards.
Azerbaijani opposition websites talk all this up this in dramatic
terms, as though the ruling elite is in agony. That seems rather
premature. The protests were fragmented and the mainstream opposition
parties remain quite marginal. President Aliev sacked some of the
officials under fire.
The trouble does, however, suggest that Aliev cannot expect a fully
smooth ride to a third term in office in October’s presidential
election. He faces the challenge of Sargysan writ large: Can he tinker
with the existing power structure and curb its most abusive elements
without weakening the very structure itself.
As they look at Georgia, many Armenians, Azerbaijanis, and Russians
see a bad advertisement for democracy. Last October, the Georgians
held a historic election in which for the first time a governing party
lost and handed over peacefully to the opposition, the Georgian Dream
coalition led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. Since then the
country has been enduring a painful “cohabitation” between
Ivanishvili’s government and President Mikheil Saakashvili until the
latter steps down in October. Every day brings political melodrama of
some kind: mutual recrimination, constitutional haggling, demarches to
foreign visitors, arrests of former officials, and even a fight on the
street as the president was preparing to give a speech.
On the inside, the mood in the country is not as turbulent as that
would suggest. There is a lot of continuity in lower levels of
government. The impressive new justice minister, Tea Tsulukiani, told
me that she has retained 98 percent of the staff she inherited from
her predecessor. Besides, Saakashvili’s United National Movement elite
had become aloof, unaccountable, and increasingly abusive, and
Georgians were ready for a change. The new government has not got a
good grip on many issues and the economy has been performing
badly. But a change of power is enabling it to correct many
unaddressed problems, such as a very punitive judicial system, hidden
monopolies, or the state of agriculture.
Georgia has the same structural deficiency as its post-Soviet
neighbors: a chronic lack of checks and balances. Here Ivanishvili has
been dealt a weak hand. But if his government avoids some major
pitfalls, Georgia can still be a success story.
On some issues, Ivanishvili can do well by doing nothing. For example,
it will be positive if his government does not interfere in Georgia’s
television channels, which have been offering a much more diverse diet
of news since the elections. If Ivanishvili follows through on his
plans to overhaul local government, create 300 municipalities, and
establish genuine regional democracy in Georgia, that will strike a
heavy blow against patriarchal government from Tbilisi.
The biggest test of Georgia’s fragile democracy will come in October
with the presidential election. The new president will still be head
of state but with diminished powers. Nonetheless, he (or, less likely,
she) will be a counterweight to the prime minister. Ivanishvili’s
choice of candidate — a strong, independent individual or a less
prominent figure — will be another indicator of the health of
Georgian democracy. Ivanishvili has already rebuked an early favorite
(especially in Western capitals), Defense Minister Irakli Alasania, by
stripping him of his other job as deputy prime minister, after he
showed signs of excessive independence. Some of Ivanishvili’s
supporters are also suggesting a retrograde step, a system in which
the president is elected not by the public but by parliament.
Georgian politics is certainly chaotic and dramatic, but the
alternative is surely worse. It is better to see disputes fought out
in parliament or on television than on the streets. The country seems
to be struggling to achieve Nassim Taleb’s concept of
“anti-fragility,” adaptability to change. As neighboring leaders look
down at the apparently more stable ground beneath their feet, they
should consider that most of Georgia’s challenges may still be ahead
of them.
Thomas de Waal is a senior associate at the Russia and Eurasia Program
of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC.