Features of Coexistence of Power and Opposition in Georgia

The quality of democracy in any country is determined by the culture of relations between the power and opposition, the degree of agreement between political forces regarding the basic values ​​of democracy, and whether the political process develops within the legal framework or deviates from the norms declared in the constitution. In Georgia, during the period of the ethnopolitical national-dissident governments of Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the neo-nomenklatura governments of Eduard Shevardnadze, the pro-Western neoliberal-authoritarian governments of Mikheil Saakashvili and the right-wing conservative governments of Bidzina Ivanishvili, certain rules of the game were established in politics, which are characterized by the specifics of the rule of each political force, but have common features: professional skills are of secondary importance in the selection of personnel (with rare exceptions): under Gamsakhurdia, along with loyalty, merits in the national movement were taken into account, under Shevardnadze - the neo-nomenklatura communist past, under Saakashvili - European education, youth and membership in the "National Party". The Ivanishvili government also declares itself as a self-sufficient political force, taking into account loyalty to the leader along with Western education. All four governments, to one degree or another, have a nationalist ideology as their main ideological orientation. Based on the above, the failures in the country's modernization are mainly due to the low qualifications of the authorities and are difficult to analyze using the value research method: both the authorities and the opposition can hardly be called a political elite, since they include very few educated people with management skills. However, if we use the altimetric approach, the political elite is considered to be a group of people at the highest levels of power who, together with the leader, make decisions important for the country (regardless of how they affect the country's development). In this sense, elites exist at any stage of society's development. During Gamsakhurdia's rule, the culture of cooperation between the authorities and the opposition was practically non-existent, since the actions of political entities were not limited by democratic institutions and constitutional norms; At the first stage, the Shevardnadze government shared power with the criminal world. Only later, after the adoption of legitimate institutions of power and the constitution, the need to comply with constitutional norms was established in the political process, although the subordinate political culture, inclined to forceful methods, still plays a dominant role. Shevardnadze, Gamsakhurdia, Saakashvili and Ivanishvili actively used the Soviet practice of modeling the “image of the enemy” during the pre-election period. In the Georgian reality, ideological orientations play a secondary role, both within the government and in the opposition spectrum: foreign policy orientations determine the affiliation of a political force with liberal democracy or, conversely, conservatism, which is associated with authoritarianism and Russia (let us hope that the coming to power of the Trump administration will change this approach, since developed countries always stand on two ideologies, as is the case in Western democracies). Liberalism and conservatism are used in a pejorative context (for example, “liberal fascism”), and terms characteristic of democracy (consensus, cooperation, mutual respect, mutual benefit) are almost never used in the lexicon of relations between the government and the opposition. The so-called "Totalitarian personalities" have entered the political arena, characterizing political processes in terms of right-wrong, white-black, traitor-patriot. Previously, such political confrontation led the country to civil discord. Although today the country has different institutions and resources, it is necessary to reach a consensus, otherwise national interests will suffer.