There are two types of election posters adorning billboards in downtown Tbilisi. The first, for the ruling Georgian Dream party, has the colour and stars of the EU flag, vaunting Georgia’s destiny as an EU member.
The second type is also for GD, since almost no sites were made available to opposition parties in the centre of the city. Darker and more menacing, these posters juxtapose scenes of destruction in Ukraine — the collapsed bridge at Irpin, the ruined theatre in Mariupol — with pristine buildings in Georgia. The message is clear: choose GD, a party controlled by the pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, for peace, or back the opposition and bring war.
While the pro-EU message of the first posters is calculated to garner support in a country where the overwhelming majority of people are in favour of joining, these latter posters have outraged many Georgians, who feel a deep sense of solidarity with Ukraine. The mountainous Caucasus nation has fought two wars with Russia since gaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Moscow’s seizure of the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008 — with little resistance from the west — marked the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s attempt to re-establish a Russian empire through military might.