In Tbilisi

Since the disputed elections of October 2024, protesters have gathered daily in front of the Georgian parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue in central Tbilisi. These days they wear creative face coverings: costume masks, broad-brimmed hats, lace bandeaux, disposable Covid masks and sunglasses.

Joining the protests now carries a steep price. Facial recognition technology has led to fines for ‘blocking the street’ of up to five thousand laris, about £1350. Hundreds of people have been arrested and are awaiting trial for ‘organising, leading or participating in collective violence’ or, sometimes, ‘assaulting a police officer’. They could spend the next couple of years in prison.

Georgia – like China, Russia and the UAE – is implementing biometric surveillance enhanced by AI. (The European Union, which Georgia has ambitions to join one day, has formally banning facial recognition in public spaces.) The streets of Tbilisi are lined with new cameras. Most of them are Chinese-made, either by Hikvision or by Dahua Technology. It’s unclear how the algorithm would differentiate between a protester and a passerby: I’ve taken up using side streets to avoid them.

In last year’s elections, the conservative populist party Georgian Dream, which was founded by the pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili and has been in power since 2012, retained control in a vote that was widely seen as neither free nor fair. They announced that EU accession negotiations would be suspended until 2028, even though the ambition to join the bloc is inscribed in the Georgia’s constitution.

During the election campaign, Georgian Dream had rallied against what it called ‘the global party of war’, a Western conspiracy bent on using Georgians as pawns in their battle against Moscow. Posters showed a destroyed Ukrainian church juxtaposed with an intact Georgian one. Georgian Dream promised a different path: safeguarding peace through pragmatic relations with the Kremlin.

After the election commission handed the party its fourth mandate, protesters took to the streets. The authorities responded at first with tear gas and mass detentions, before shifting to cleaner tactics: they tightened protest laws and invested in the AI-assisted cameras.

Khatia, who’s in her twenties, told me she’d joined the protests because her European identity runs deep. When we talked, she was in Batumi on the Black Sea, Georgia’s second city, at the trial of the journalist Mzia Amaglobeli: ‘She is such a phenomenon for everything she has done for the Georgian media and Georgian people,’ Khatia said. ‘When I think about the injustice of it, about all the political prisoners, it just eats me alive.’ Since then, Mzia has been sentenced to two years in prison, after legal proceedings ‘riddled with procedural violations and bias’, according to Amnesty International.

‘The more involved you get,’ she told me, ‘the more often you will go to the court sessions, and the more often you will see people fighting alongside you. It makes you believe that this is not over … There is an opportunity, time and a place that you will win.’ When a friend was fined twice, ‘I went to her court session and we paid, but I never felt like this is something that should stop me … I know I’m on the right side so I still go to Rustaveli Avenue to protest, and I just wear a mask or sunglasses.’

Georgians have seen the introduction of so-called anti-LGBTQI+ propaganda laws, a ‘foreign agent law’ requiring NGOs and media organisations that receive over 20 per cent of their funding from abroad to register as ‘organisations serving the interests of a foreign power’ and the systematic reorganisation of cultural institutions.

The government has barred five foreign journalists this year, according to Reporters without Borders, while suppressing local independent media with heavy fines and prison sentences. New laws allow the authorities to ‘shut down media outlets, censor their reporting or prosecute their managers’, according to RSF.

Many Georgians wonder what the government had seen in Ukraine’s devastation that convinced them to bet on rapprochement with Russia. The two countries never signed a peace treaty after the 2008 war, and there are still no formal diplomatic relations between Russia and Georgia.

In February, the EU announced that it did not recognise the election results. In May it froze Georgia’s accession process. In July, it threatened to end visa-free travel for Georgians.

I met my friend T., who studies the repression of social movements, at a restaurant on Rustaveli Avenue. Over khinkalis, or Georgian dumplings, they told me how ‘the judiciary became the main tool of repression. Profoundly unfair trials were held where teenagers got heavy sentences in prison for taking part in protests. A legal facade works better in the eye of the opinion and allows [the authorities] to depict the protesters as either pro-UNM [the opposition party] or LGBTQI+ or lost youngsters manipulated and so on. It’s better than having teenagers being beaten up in the streets like it used to be in 2024.’

According to T., Georgia’s authoritarian drift began years ago and accelerated after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But ‘Georgia is not necessarily embracing Russia. There is a local authoritarianism developing, and the government is as opportunist as it can be, with the EU, Russia, Middle Eastern countries and even China. If we want a reference, looking at Viktor Orban’s Hungary might be relevant. And we have to acknowledge that these techniques are effective. Taking to the streets just became too risky.’