Elections updates: Georgia, Germany

Item one: in my push to finish all my grading and a series of end of semester commitment I missed the Georgia presidential election. It was a doozy.

Georgia’s governing party has anointed a former footballer turned far-right politician as the country’s new president amid ongoing turmoil following disputed elections in October.

Mikheil Kavelashvili, nominated by the Georgian Dream party, was the only candidate standing in Saturday’s vote which was put to a 300-seat electoral college rather than the people as a result of constitutional changes introduced by the party seven years ago.

Reporting from Tbilisi, Al Jazeera’s Dmitry Medvedenko explained that the 53-year-old faced no competition “because the opposition believes this government is illegitimate, so they’re not taking part in any processes that would legitimise the government.”

The opposition has boycotted parliament amid nationwide protests over the outcome of legislative elections on October 26, during which observers reported instances of bribery and double voting.

The current president says she’s not leaving office.

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili announced Friday that she does not recognize the legitimacy of the presidential election scheduled for Saturday.

Zourabichvili highlighted at a news conference that for the first time in Georgian history, the president will be elected by a 300-member electoral college convening in parliament.

Reiterating her intention to remain in office until new parliamentary elections are held, Zourabichvili said: “I’m not going anywhere, I’m not leaving the office, I’m here and I’ll be here.”

I could attempt to justify missing this election on the grounds that it wasn’t an election, as the popular vote is no longer used in the selection of Georgian presidents. In 2017, Georgia altered its constitution to make presidents selected by an electoral college of 300 people, primarily MPs and local/regional government officials. Zourabichvili was elected the old-fashioned way (she took office and the constitutional changes went into force on the same day in 2018). I have no insightful commentary to offer here, other than to lament the malign influence of their neighbor to the North and the unfortunate trend toward democratic backsliding seemingly accelerating here.

Item two: A major new election has been added to the 2025 calendar. As seemed likely when his government proved themselves unable to produce a budget last month, Olaf Scholz has lost a confidence vote, paving the way for a February snap election in Germany:

Scholz’s decision to stage a vote he expected to lose in order to dissolve his own government was described as a “kamikaze” move by the German tabloid Bild – but it is generally the only way a German government can dissolve parliament and spark early elections.

The process was designed specifically by the post-war founders of modern Germany to avoid the political instability of the Weimar era.

This vote of confidence is not a political crisis in itself: it is a standard constitutional mechanism that has been used by modern German chancellors five times to overcome political stalemate – and one Gerhard Schröder deployed on two occasions.

However, there is a deeper problem within German politics.

On the surface, the collapse of the coalition was sparked by a row over money. Scholz’s centre-left SDP and his Green partners wanted to ease Germany’s strict debt rules to finance support for Ukraine and key infrastructure projects.

That was blocked by Scholz’s own finance minister, Christian Lindner, who is the leader of the business-friendly liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), which prioritised driving down the debt.

Lindner was sacked and the coalition collapsed. After years of unedifying bickering, you could almost hear the sigh of relief in Berlin’s corridors of power – but the underlying cause is more difficult to resolve and more worrying.

One of my greatest failures in judgement on political matters in recent years was my cautious optimism about the traffic light coalition; I foolishly thought that the coalition partners might constrain each other’s worst tendencies when the opposite was more or less the case. The decision to shut down nuclear power plants a decade or more before the end of their natural life, thus extending Germany’s reliance on coal further into the future and making them more dependent on Russian gas now, would have been a terrible policy under any circumstances, but of course this particular act of rank stupidity and climate arson was amplified and exposed thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Polling suggests 2/3 of the current coalition, the SDP and the FDP, will take a big hit, with the former well under 20% and behind the AfD, and the latter flirting with the 5% threshold for PR seats (Germany is a mix of single member districts and PR seats that are allotted to render the overall make-up of parliament proportional). The Greens, on the other hand, are seeing a bit of a boost into the mid-teens. The CDU/CSU union looks like a shoo-in to win, with the AfD a distant second–likely to put up their best result ever, but well short of a total that will allow them to force themselves into government. Polling suggests the potential for electoral disaster for the non-Green further left, as BSW, a populist/nationalist/anti-immigration/socially conservative “left” party a new offshoot of Die Linke, is rendering it entirely possible neither hits 5%, although polling suggests BSW is more likely to make it than Die Linke. I wonder if their most useful function might be to limit AfD’s growth.

If the likely outcome was a return to a Merkel-led Union government, I wouldn’t be particularly sad about it. The current leader of the Union, Friedrich Merz, appears to be eager to take the Union in a more conservative direction than Merkel. That said, one clear positive consequence of a likely Merz chancellorship will be more robust and unequivocal support for Ukraine, which will come at a time when such support is particularly badly needed. Of course, the election season is a few hours old; a lot can change in two months.

Next up in elections of the day are Chad’s parliamentary election and Croatia’s presidential election, both on 12/29. January appears pretty barren on the elections front, although Lukashenko’s “election” for his 7th term in Belarus will require coverage. If you are aware of some election between in the rest of December or January that you believe deserves coverage in this series, please let me know in the comments.

Update: A third item of note is the current turmoil and chaos in Trudeau’s cabinet following the resignation of his finance minister; apparently a prorogation of parliament and a resignation are both on the table. An election is coming soon regardless of what happens today, although this could hasten it. The Liberals appear to be drawing dead, it’s hard to imagine Trudeau resigning as leader saving them, but it seems more likely to help than hurt on the margins.