Quo vadis, Georgia? The political strategy of a conservative twist in the new cycle of populism under Georgian Dream rule (2020–24)

This article argues that the ruling Georgian Dream party promoted populist-conservative discourse to set value borders with the European Union (EU). The populist rhetoric denounces the liberal project of Europe as inconsistent with the traditional-conservative and Orthodox-religious values of Georgia and synchronises its policy with the populist-conservatists within the EU on the issue of sovereignty. The article analyses the transformation of the foreign policy of the Georgian Dream towards the EU through applying the demarcation–integration cleavages crystallised by the Georgian Dream party to the populist radical right-wing direction. The article grounds populism as a discourse created by the ruling Georgian Dream party through the strategy of radicalisation, setting the new demarcation–integration cleavages. The conservative-populist discourse constructs the Georgian people as a cultural unit confined within the Georgian nation-state and is used as a strategy to selectively oppose or undermine the idea of European integration. The article uses a discourse-historical approach, collecting and analysing information related to particular past events and allowing predictions for the future. A process-tracing method, in its causal inference line, reconstructs the changing political tendencies through an analysis of the public speeches and state-of-the-union addresses of leading figures of the Georgian Dream party, as well as commentaries and policy papers. The article demonstrates that populist-conservative rhetoric enabled the ruling Georgian Dream to hijack the domestic discourse and left opposition parties with the choice of whether to respond to its populist-conservative messages before the parliamentary elections of October 2024.