Thousands gathered outside the parliament building in Tbilisi on Monday night amid opposition claims that Saturday's parliamentary elections were "rigged.".
The strategy is not new, and designed to pressure the ruling party into becoming more malleable to Western interests, says political analyst and Caucasus politics expert Stanislav Tarasov.
The United States and the European Union “want to create a whole package of conflict situations: Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, and to play these games like a grandmaster across multiple boards, yielding somewhere while hitting out somewhere else," Tarasov told Sputnik, commenting on the shaky political situation in Georgia after the weekend's parliamentary vote, which some observers fear may escalate into a new Euromaidan-style coup scenario.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller announced Monday that the US would "join calls for international and local observers for a full investigation of all reports of election-related violations."
The US has "consistently urged the Georgian government this year to walk back its anti-democratic actions and return to its Euro-Atlantic path. We do not rule out further consequences if the Georgian government's direction does not change," Miller warned.
Georgia can expect further pressure from the West, including sanctions, if the Georgian Dream Party government sticks to its independence on foreign and domestic policy, Tarasov says.
“They’ll impose sanctions... They can’t very well send in the armed forces or some expeditionary corps. First, they feed them some investments, then they impose sanctions; first they open a visa regime; then they impose bans, and so on and so forth...This is the primitive scheme in the American version of colonial rule being implemented concerning Georgia,” the observer said.
Pointing to the unlikelihood of the West being able to oust the ruling Georgian Dream Party, which won nearly 54% of the vote and gathered enough seats to form a new government, Tarasov believes the opposition’s claims of fraud and manipulation may not be aimed at overthrowing the government but forcing it to accept members of the opposition into a coalition to “erode” it from within.
“The Americans understand that they cannot hold Georgia, but they can destabilise the situation in the region through it. That’s what they’re doing – it’s a holding operation,” the observer summed up.
