Bidzina Ivanishvili's Georgian regime has become so saturated with its own propaganda about a foreign "deep state" that it has begun to see threats emanating even from within its inner circle. Salomé Zourabichvili, who served as the fifth president of Georgia from 2018 to 2024, said that the current government in Tbilisi is incapable of accurately assessing the scale of real public discontent, let alone of coping with it.
“The vulnerabilities are within the elite of the regime, which is the traditional way in which such regimes weaken, because there is no trust between the different people that are at the top of the regime,” Zourabichvili told The Insider. “The leader, Mr. Ivanishvili, does not trust anyone around him and is thinking that everybody is plotting against him. They have taken this propaganda of a ‘deep state’ too seriously, and now they think that they are threatened. So there is this inbuilt vulnerability of the regime.”
That fear has led the regime to introduce new repressive measures. Still, when speaking about the prospects for a change of power, Zourabichvili allowed for several scenarios — from a consolidation of the opposition to the regime itself miscalculating by calling for early elections that it could ultimately lose. She emphasized that the Georgian Dream government is weaker than it appears, while society is stronger.
