The Taming of Politics

Op-ed

The 2018 presidential election in Georgia is not over yet! A monstrous question mark now ominously hangs over the political structure of the Republic ahead of a second round of voting and the parties are getting ready to play off an additional electoral game. The local media is bursting with a broad range of election campaign messages, varying so widely that confusion has overwhelmed the entire electoral corps. The moment has arrived when the importance of an election campaign is finally appreciated and taken seriously.

The impression is that the maturation of democracy has truly started in Georgia. The constituency has the feelers out to find out if this is the moment when a political struggle stops smelling like regular bread-and-butter and enters the phase of genuine passion and political romanticism. Times have changed! The rise and fall of leaders as a consequence of electoral efforts is acquiring a trivial coloring, no longer capable of unleashing the inflated national excitement as it once did in our post-socialist past. Political assumptions, key concepts and predictions are turning from accidental or stubborn inferences into logically balanced deductions. Experts and plain opinion pushers want to sound as intelligent and educated as possible – they have grasped well that a word spoken is past recalling. The overall news coverage of the election campaign is as professional as never before. There is almost no difference – if only technical – between how media, especially the broadcast one, operates here and in Europe or America. We have come to understand that an election campaign may serve not only its immediate purpose and meaning, which is the election of a person to a certain post, but also a number of valuable functions, like the advent of full-grown democracy, guaranteed domestic tranquility, well-observed constitutionality, the opportunity for further development and a chance to figure as a deserving player of a Western game.

Watching the current electoral campaign, one could easily notice that the loud acclaims, vehement attacks and peevish defenses were all in place, which certainly looked unattractive, but the world has in the recent past seen filthier electoral campaigns in other countries. As a compensation to those drawbacks, we have come to believe that the electoral policy as well as the candidate’s personality, image, character, style, vocabulary, manner and messages have a direct effect on the campaign process, especially in the final phase. Campaigns that do not carry meaningful persuasive power and are devoid of farsighted considerations may create problems that might be almost impossible to rectify later.

What is the importance of campaigns and why do nations spend so much money and energy holding them up? Answering this question might take volumes to write in theoretical deliberation, but using a simpler language, it is an opportunity for the exchange and collection of enough information to allow for a well-versed choice to be made. The accumulation and swapping of information should be the best prerequisite for knowledgeable participation in the process. This said, a comment is asking to be made that our electoral campaigns lack that indispensable component.

It is generically thought that the perfection of electoral campaigns is conducive to democratization, and that democratization works as the key to promoting freedom and prosperity in still-developing nations like Georgia. The nature and the qualitative variables of the electoral campaign give us leaders accountable to their citizens and with enough qualifications and sense of responsibility for good governance, so removing the institutional barriers to economic development. It is also taken for granted that democratic countries tend to perform better than autocracies because in democracies like Georgia, free and fair elections, universal adult suffrage, freedom of speech, association and press are no longer strangers, where elected officials will never be unjustifiably influenced by unelected groups such as the military or religious leaders.

Hopefully, none of these conditions is going to be routinely violated in this country. Otherwise, it will be doomed to plunge into undemocratic expansion. In the still-ongoing presidential election, including voters and managers, volunteers and promoters, ruling and oppositional powers, all as part of the whole, are inadvertently, although with certain anger and grudge, working in Georgia towards that positive democratic outcome.

By Nugzar B. Ruhadze

A lion tamer and a lion, 1977. By Werner Rzehaczek, Germany