A Georgian Dream MP who criticised the west over a “policy of blackmail and threats” has been appointed to lead the country’s security services as an authoritative report warned of an autocratic takeover.
Mamuka Mdinaradze, who was the parliamentary majority leader for the ruling party, was confirmed on Wednesday as head of the country’s powerful state security service.
He has previously attacked the EU and the US for criticising the Georgian government over democratic backsliding, with Brussels warning of a blockage on Georgia’s long-held aspiration to join the bloc.
Mdinaradze was also responsible for introducing a “successor parties bill” in parliament to target opposition groups said to be hostile to the ruling party.
The law aims to ban political movements “whose activities, the personal composition of decision-makers, or statutory goals” are identical to those of the previous governing party, the United National Movement.
Mdinaradze has described the UNM as “anti-Georgian, anti-constitutional, anti-national and criminal”.
His appointment came as a report, published by the Rule of Law Lab at New York University School of Law and Gnomon Wise, a Georgian research institute, claimed the Georgian Dream party led by the billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili had consolidated its autocratic control.
The report warns that Georgia’s institutions have “been systematically eroded and repurposed to entrench a personalist regime” led by Ivanishvili, the chair of Georgian Dream and the country’s richest man.
The regime is said to have taken control of the courts by reconfiguring and politicising the high council of justice to become the sole authority over judicial careers, leading to a “purge of disobedient judges”.
The prosecution service is “tightly controlled” by Ivanishvili through a loyal prosecutor general and “a rigid, Soviet-style hierarchy”, the report claims, in which “prosecutors act as political enforcers, targeting critics and shielding allies”.
The state security service that will be led by Mdinaradze is said to have evolved into a “sprawling surveillance and enforcement body”.
The report’s authors write: “The Ivanishvili regime has entrenched authoritarian control by weaponising Georgia’s internal security apparatus.
“Two key institutions – the ministry of internal affairs (MIA) and the state security service (SSS) – form the backbone of this repressive machinery.
“Though the SSS is nominally independent from the executive, both agencies are staffed by loyalists and operate with no meaningful oversight, answering directly to Ivanishvili.
“The SSS, in particular, has evolved into a sprawling surveillance and enforcement body. The MIA, through its department of special tasks, has led violent crackdowns on protesters.”
Last year, hundreds of thousands of protesters demonstrated on the streets of the capital, Tbilisi, against a law that obliged media or civil society groups in Georgia that receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as “organisations serving the interests of a foreign power”.
The EU gave the Georgian government a deadline of 31 August to report back on a series of recommendations after the bloc warned that it would end visa-free travel if laws deemed to be autocratic were not repealed, including the controversial “foreign agents” and anti-LGBT laws.
A report has been submitted by the government but the lack of reform, and the rhetoric of leading Georgian Dream figures, suggests the responses to the EU recommendations are unlikely to be found acceptable.
David Zedelashvili, a co-author of the report and leading constitutional lawyer from the Gnomon Wise research institute based at the University of Georgia, in Tbilisi, said: “This report meticulously documents Georgia’s descent into authoritarianism, pinpointing the core pillars of its authoritarian regime and providing targeted strategies to halt its further entrenchment”.
