Billionaire's shifting politics may decide Georgia's future

Ex-PM Bidzina Ivanishvili looms over his nation’s upcoming election through bulletproof glass

- Felix Light

Georgia’s saviour. Russia’s stooge. Philanthropist. Oligarch. Bidzina Ivanishvili has been called all these things, and more.

The billionaire, Georgia’s richest person and the founder of its ruling party, is seldom seen in public and, of late, almost exclusively behind bulletproof glass. Yet his presence looms large over this small European country caught between Russia and the West, and an election that could shape its destiny.

Ivanishvili can gaze down on downtown Tbilisi from a massive steel-and-glass clifftop mansion that rears about 60 metres over the capital, complete with helipad. He indulges in exotic passions like keeping sharks and zebras, and collecting rare trees.

The 68-year-old is viewed by many friends and foes alike as Georgia’s most powerful figure, or eminence grise, even though he hasn’t held public office for over a decade. He has cast Saturday’s election as an existential fight to prevent a “Global War Party” in the West from pushing Georgia into a ruinous conflict with former overlord Russia like he says it did with Ukraine.

“Georgia and Ukraine were not allowed to join Nato and were left outside,” he said in a rare public appearance at a progovernment rally in Tbilisi on 29 April. “All such decisions are made by the Global War Party, which has a decisive influence on Nato and the European Union and which only sees Georgia and Ukraine as cannon fodder.”

While most of Georgia’s 3.7 million people are keen to move closer to the West by joining the EU and Nato, and largely don’t trust Russia, opinion polls show, Ivanishvili’s message resounds with many who want to avoid Ukraine’s fate at all costs. Memories are fresh of a 2008 war with Russia over the Moscowbacked breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which lasted five days and ended in Georgia’s defeat.