By the tens of thousands, Georgians flocked to Tbilisi, the country’s capital, on buses requisitioned by the government on April 29 to listen to Bidzina Ivanishvili’s speech. The moment, it must be admitted, is exceptional. For many years, the very secretive founder of the ruling party, Georgian Dream, has avoided any public appearance. But this day, he makes an exception. Opposite the Parliament, avenue Roustavéli, Ivanishvili passionately defends the “law on foreign influences”, which must be adopted in mid-May and has sparked demonstrations throughout the country for several weeks. Liberticide, this text would require any NGO or media organization receiving 20% of foreign funding to register as an “organization pursuing the interests of a foreign power”.
Called “Russian law” by the demonstrators, the project is a pale copy of that on “foreign agents”, passed in Russia in 2012. Bidzina Ivanishvili’s speech also bears a striking resemblance to that of the Moscow leaders. In his diatribe, he castigates the entire West, this “global war party”, and attacks the “LGBT propaganda” which is invading his country. At 68 years old, this former Prime Minister (from 2012 to 2013) continues to set the pace for Georgian politics. And although he claims to have retired from political life in 2021, “Ivanishvili never stopped making all the decisions behind the scenes, assures Ghia Nodia, political scientist at Tbilisi State University and former minister of Education. The forceful passage of the law on foreign influences obviously comes from him.”
Billionaire and French citizen
If this mysterious man rules Georgian politics, it is thanks to his immense fortune, estimated at 4 billion euros. The billionaire got rich in Russia in the banking sector, during the crazy era of the 1990s and Perestroika – which made him the richest man in this country of 3.7 million souls. For years, he has sprinkled the Georgian cultural scene with millions distributed via his foundation, Cartu. But above all, he controls power, since he placed his men in key positions in the State. His former security agent is the current Minister of the Interior. His wife’s dentist served as Minister of Health, while former Prime Minister Irakli Garibavchili was her secretary and agent for her rapper son, Bera. And what can we say about the new head of government, Irakli Khobaridze, appointed last February, who, during his induction before the executives of Georgian Dream, had asked for permission to his master Ivanichvili to go on stage…
Before his anti-Western turnaround, the oligarch seemed in favor of a rapprochement with the West. Originally from Tchorvila, in the Imerethi region, he left Russia in the 2000s for Georgia, after a short stay in France – the time to acquire nationality there. “For him, France has always been a plan B, that is to say a place where he can take refuge if things go wrong in Russia and Georgia,” explains Thorniké Gordadzé, former Georgian minister of transition. European and professor at Sciences Po Paris. Financing the French high school in the Caucasus, the oligarch even received the Legion of Honor in 2021 from Emmanuel Macron!
Shark breeding
In Georgia, the story is more tumultuous. Initially close to the former pro-European president Mikheïl Saakashvili, whose modernizing reforms he financed, Ivanishvili then broke off relations with the latter after the 2008 war with Russia, which then took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. “Ivanishvili was afraid of arousing the anger of Moscow because of his links with Saakashvili,” explains Thorniké Gordadze. “It was also at this time that he created the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party.” Imprisoned since 2021, the former Prime Minister today accuses him of having become a Kremlin puppet. “Vladimir Putin personally forbade the Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who makes all the decisions in Georgia, to release me,” says Saakashvili, from his cell, in a letter recently published by L’Express.
Winner of the legislative elections in 2012, Ivanishvili became Prime Minister. Then secretary of the National Defense Council, Giga Bokéria remembers their first meeting: “He told me two things. First, that I would end up in prison if I continued to be in politics. Then, he asked me a question: ‘Was Mossad really behind the September 11 attacks? 2001”?”
But conspiracy is not the billionaire’s only fanciful personality trait. When he stays in his 40 million euro mansion on the heights of Tbilisi, the elusive businessman likes to admire his collection of exotic animals, which includes chinchillas, lemurs and… sharks. In L’one of his rare media appearanceshe launches into crazy declarations on psychoanalysis and the mother-child bond, “his great passion”.
Pro-Russian connections
It is indeed this eccentric character who, today, is endangering the future of Georgia and embarrassing even Brussels. Because the promulgation of the law on “foreign influences”, now ratified at second reading and having every chance of being voted on, would put a brake on the process of integration of this former Soviet republic into the European Union, then that the country has been a candidate since December 2023.
Officially, the billionaire maintains that Georgia will be part of the EU by 2030. It is difficult, however, to believe this when we know the man’s affinities with Russian power. Thus, the former Prosecutor General of Georgia, Otar Partskhaladze, whose links with the FSB are proven and sanctioned by the United States, is close to Ivanishvili’s family circle. And in 2022, a conversation between the latter and Vladimir Yevtushenkov, Russian oligarch at the head of the mobile operator Sistema, leak on the Internet. The subject: how Ivanishvili could help the businessman circumvent the sanctions targeting Russia…
Whether he is in the shadows or in the light, Bidzina Ivanichvili should, whatever happens, hit the headlines in the coming weeks. Some see in the strongman of the “Georgian Dream” a local “Viktor Yanukovych” – named after the pro-Russian president ousted from power in Ukraine during the pro-European Maidan revolution in 2014. “He played until the end the ambiguity between the pro-Western and conservative pro-Russian lines”, summarizes Giga Bokeria. Will he pay the price or will he emerge from this political sequence reinforced? The young Georgian generation, which now gathers every evening in front of the Paragraph Hotel, one of its countless real estate properties, has in any case well understood that it is at the heart of the chessboard.
.