“We fucked up.” It’s not often you hear a democracy activist open with those words, but Nino Robakidze, a veteran democracy activist with over 15 years fighting for Georgian freedom, isn’t interested in pretty narratives.

Speaking at the “FuckUp Night” panel at the Lviv Media Forum 2025, Robakidze laid bare how Georgian civil society enabled the fastest documented democratic collapse in modern European history.

The timeline is breathtaking: December 2023, Georgia receives EU candidate status. Eighteen months later, dozens of political prisoners, including four high-profile politicians, fill Georgian jails, independent media faces criminal prosecution, and the government has abandoned European integration entirely. Over 200 public servants were fired simply for posting pro-European statements on Facebook.

“Georgian civil society is in a perfect storm,” she says. “We saw the red flags. We really saw the red flags. But it was so uncomfortable to really talk about that.”

From EU dreams to Russian nightmare in record time

Twenty-one years after the Rose Revolution promised Georgia a European future, the country has achieved something unprecedented: the fastest documented slide from EU candidate to authoritarian crackdown in European history.

The timeline is breathtaking.

• December 2023: EU grants Georgia candidate status.
• May 2024: Government passes Russian-style “foreign agent” law.
• October 2024: Elections marked by widespread fraud.
• November 2024: Government suspends EU talks.
• January 2025: First female journalist political prisoner.

The halt to EU accession talks were the straw that broke the camel’s back. Polls show 80% of Georgians want EU membership—one of the highest rates in any candidate country.

What followed was six months of non-stop protests across Georgia—unprecedented in the country’s history. Police have violently dispersed demonstrators using water cannons and tear gas against crowds singing the EU anthem.

Hundreds have been arrested, including Mzia Amaglobeli, co-founder of independent outlets Batumelebi and Netgazeti, who faces up to seven years in prison for symbolically slapping a police chief after he allegedly spat in her face and verbally abused her. She became Georgia’s first female journalist to be designated a political prisoner.

But Robakidze, former Country Director for IREX Georgia, isn’t just analyzing the crisis—she’s dissecting how democracy defenders like herself enabled it through a fatal dependency that made Georgian freedom hostage to foreign funding.

For two decades, the US government poured millions into Georgian civil society—building the independent media, NGOs, and democracy programs that became the envy of the former Soviet space. That investment created something genuinely remarkable: a vibrant civil society that helped Georgia become a beacon of democratic progress in the region.

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The fatal dependency: how Western money created the weapon to destroy democracy

For two decades, Georgian civil society lived on life support: US government funding. Independent media, NGOs, democracy programs—all relied heavily on American largesse because local businesses feared government retaliation for supporting critical outlets.

“This was mainly the US government funding because there was not enough advertising money in independent media,” Robakidze explains. Vulnerable to state pressure, “big business did not want to work with media outlets like this because they were investigating government corruption.”

But the irony runs deeper—and darker. Western funding didn’t just create the vulnerability; it actively trained the oppressors.

Georgian Dream created Western-funded strategic communication units across government ministries. “And then this communication in the crisis, when the crisis was approaching, was used against those who were actually protecting Western values—civil society, media, free media, etc.”

The absurdity was complete: civil society trained its own oppressors. “We were inviting representatives of this group to different trainings, on strategic communication, on public opinion research, and they learned the lesson really well. Maybe they were the best in their class, actually.”

The students became the masters, using Western-funded skills to dismantle Western values.

Playing fair while opponents cheated

Civil society’s commitment to democratic norms became another vulnerability. While democracy defenders insisted on fact-checking, verification, and due process, their opponents weaponized speed and fabrication.

During Georgia’s October 2024 elections, civil society deployed 3,000 trained observers who knew by 11 AM they were witnessing “the worst election in Georgian democratic history.” But while they spent the day meticulously fact-checking evidence of fraud, Georgian Dream simply declared victory at 8 PM.

“We struggled to communicate this on time because we were checking each and every case, double-checking it,” Robakidze recalls. “But we lost the battle of the very important, crucial minute.”

Civil society eventually proved the elections were fraudulent—no international observer recognized the results as legitimate. But Georgian Dream had already won by ignoring the verification process that constrained their opponents.

“We collected all this evidence… But we lost the battle of the very important, crucial minute,” Robakidze reflects. It revealed a global pattern: authoritarian forces exploit democracy’s commitment to due process, turning democratic values into democratic vulnerabilities.

The statistical proof

Stolen election: how the Georgian Dream helped itself to 15% of all votes cast

Media massacre: systematic destruction of independent voices

The government’s media strategy went beyond funding manipulation—it became systematic annihilation. In April 2025, the Georgian Public Broadcaster fired two prominent journalists—Nino Zautashvili and Vasil Ivanov-Chikovani—after they openly criticized the channel’s editorial policy. Ivanov-Chikovani had stated live on air that the broadcaster’s editorial policy “fails to meet the public’s demands.”

The broadcaster’s supervisory board, headed by Vasil Maghlaperidze—a former deputy chair of the ruling Georgian Dream party—called for prosecutors to investigate journalists who criticized the channel’s coverage. The message was clear: dissent will be criminalized.

Since May 2024, more than 30 journalists covering the “foreign agent” bill have been targeted with anonymous threatening phone calls. Unknown individuals plastered posters on journalists’ homes and offices, denouncing them as “foreign agents” with messages like “There is no place in Georgia for agents.”

The new Foreign Agents Registration Act grants the state authority to criminally prosecute media outlets, NGOs, and individuals for failing to register as a “foreign agent,” with penalties of up to five years in prison. As one media executive warned: “We will work as volunteers as long as we can… But I cannot take any money from any donor past May 30, because I don’t want to go to jail.”

More than 70 journalists have been injured while covering protests, with some hospitalized. The systematic nature is unmistakable: this isn’t random violence but coordinated destruction of independent media.

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The confession: “I was not fierce enough”

For Robakidze, the crisis forced brutal self-examination. Could civil society have prevented this catastrophe?

“I always ask myself: did I do everything I could to convince my colleagues and those with whom I worked closely that what is happening is dangerous, and this might lead in a very wrong direction?”

Her answer haunts her: “I think that no, I did not.”

She was part of the problem—attending conferences, sitting at tables with government representatives, participating in dialogues even as the warning signs mounted. “Maybe I was not fierce enough, and maybe the urgent situation that we have now would not have been needed if we started being really fierce and dramatic on the very first cases.”

The first red flag came just months after the peaceful 2012 transition, when Georgian Dream defeated Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement in parliamentary elections. The victory was celebrated as a triumph of Georgian democracy—the first peaceful transfer of power in the post-Soviet space.

But the honeymoon was brief. On 17 May 2013—International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia—a small solidarity gathering of maybe 50 people, mostly journalists and human rights defenders, planned to remember LGBTQI+ victims in Tbilisi’s city center.

Instead, they were attacked by a massive, organized mob, with things getting so out of hand that the 50 protesters needed to be bussed out.

For Robakidze, this wasn’t random violence—it was a test. “At that moment Georgia government had a really brilliant police structure. There was no way, no chance, if the state wanted to protect these people, that things could get so ugly and so violent.”

The attack was “visible that it was organized… And those people were having the blessing or green light from the government and Ministry of Interior.”

The red flag was a warning of things to come: 12 years later, the Georgian police disperses hundred-thousand-strong protests; the state’s repressive apparatus has been fully unleashed on the people.

More red flags followed. In 2016, Azerbaijani investigative journalist Afgan Mukhtarli was kidnapped from Tbilisi’s Freedom Square and appeared in an Azerbaijani prison. No footage existed. “We knew that there was no possibility without state interference for such things to happen.”

But civil society and international partners found it easier to focus on Georgia’s successes than confront uncomfortable realities—so they were ignored.

The lesson crystallized too late: “There is no small compromise with non-freedom. If you compromise that small thing, you definitely need to compromise the bigger thing tomorrow.”

Why Georgia will still win: the freedom advantage

Despite the catastrophic failures, Robakidze remains optimistic about Georgia’s ultimate victory. Her reasoning cuts to the heart of what separates Georgia from Russia and Belarus—and why this matters for democracies worldwide.

“Georgia was a democracy for 30 years. And we enjoyed the freedom of speech, freedom of arts, freedom of movement, everything,” she says. “We tasted freedom.”

Even under Soviet rule, Georgia maintained psychological independence. “Even during the Soviet Union, Georgia was still having that sense of freedom alive because of the language we were using, which was never Russian.”

This creates a fundamental difference from Georgia’s neighbors: “We are genuinely not part of the Russian thinking world.” The government’s target audience—those susceptible to pro-Russian messaging—consists mainly of “mostly older men in regions who had only good things happening in their early years” and “have the sentiments of the Soviet Union.”

But the crucial difference is ideological. Georgian Dream lacks what Putin possesses: an ideology, which makes long-term authoritarian consolidation questionable.

The government is “on their lowest level. Lowest approval ratings in their 12-year history.”

From dependency to independence: The silver lining

The loss of US funding, while painful, may have been necessary medicine. For the first time, Georgian civil society is learning to survive independently.

“Now, first time I see that really viable… society will support independent media and society will support civil society actions,” Robakidze observes. “Whatever happens right now is completely 100% financed by ordinary citizens who are just crowdfunding.”

This grassroots renaissance extends beyond civil society. “We also see for the first time big business also understanding the responsibility that if things go wrong in this part, we can die with them as well.”

The protests themselves represent this new independence. You cannot find “the industry or the sphere where the most prominent people are not part of the protest in Georgia.” All major theaters, singers, and composers have joined the streets. “These are theaters that young people are going to, and you cannot find a ticket for months if you want to attend a theater.”

Even government employees are risking everything. More than 200 public servants were fired simply for posting pro-European statements on Facebook—a purge that backfired by revealing the government’s desperation and creating martyrs.

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Global warning: your democracy is next

Georgia’s crisis reflects a global phenomenon that Robakidze calls the “spirit of non-freedom spreading.” The mechanics are eerily familiar across continents.

“A lot of people in the world were living many years thinking that freedom is granted and guaranteed, taking freedom for granted,” she explains. “In Europe, in the US, in the West in general, they had this problem maybe even deeper than the Georgian society has.”

Western societies “allowed in their societies this darkness to spread without reacting to it when it’s needed.”

The warning signs are identical:

• Small compromises that seem manageable
• External funding creating dependency vulnerabilities
• Strategic communication training weaponized against democracy
• Media capture through economic pressure
• Civil society taking freedom for granted.

“Right now weather is the worst for beginner democracies,” she warns. But the crisis is a “wake-up call for not just for us, for societies who want to be democratic and consolidated democracies one day, but for everyone.”

The clock is ticking

As Georgia’s protests continue into their seventh month, the timeline offers a stark warning: democratic collapse can happen faster than anyone imagines. Eighteen months from EU candidate to authoritarian crackdown.

“There is never a bad time to think about your mistakes, and we can never be uncomfortable discussing the elephant in the room, because this elephant will never go anywhere,” Robakidze reflects. “And the only problem that this discussion creates is this uncomfortable feeling, which I think is very important—better experienced earlier than later.”

The uncomfortable truth: external funding made Georgian democracy vulnerable by creating dependency rather than genuine grassroots strength. But losing that crutch may have forced the authentic resistance needed to survive.

Georgia faces its ultimate test—not just of its democratic institutions, but of whether a society that truly tasted freedom can recognize and defeat authoritarianism when it matters most. The answer will determine not just Georgia’s fate, but offer crucial lessons for every democracy grappling with its own “spirit of non-freedom.”

For Robakidze, the fight continues: “We will not let Georgia slide back under Russia’s influence.” The question is whether the world’s other democracies will learn from Georgia’s mistakes before their own 18-month countdown begins.

Ukrainian analyst Dmytro Zolotukhin recently posed a haunting question: Ukraine has been striving to be a democracy ever since it regained independence, but aren’t Ukrainians, by chance, playing in the team of losers now?

“Absolutely not,” rebutted Timothy Garton Ash at the 2025 Lviv Media Forum, the British historian and Professor of European Studies at Oxford University, whose latest book, “Homelands: A Personal History of Europe,” chronicles the continent’s transformation over half a century and won the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize.

“You’re on the winning team. It just may take a bit of time for the victory to come.”

Ash, Europe’s self-described “historian of the present” who has spent decades “breathing Europe,” believes democracy is experiencing growing pains, not death throes.

In fact, he argues that Putin’s war against Ukraine proves democracy’s enduring power.

Ash believes that one of the reasons for Russia’s ongoing invasion was the 2004 Orange Revolution, in which Ukrainians rebelled against the electoral fraud that gave a pro-Russian president victory instead of a Western-leaning candidate: “Putin thought that democracy was coming towards him, in addition to his motives of restoring the Russian Empire.”

The strength of democracy, Ash contends, is evidenced by its unprecedented expansion: “According to Freedom House, in early 1974, there were only 35 free countries in the world. By early 2004, 89.”

What we’re witnessing now, he suggests, is not democracy’s failure but a natural “anti-liberal, anti-democratic counter-revolution” in response to this historic spread, despite all of liberal democracy’s faults. The autocracies and hybrid regimes are simply not delivering—hundreds of thousands of people protesting in Hungary, Serbia, and Hungary are proof of that, Ash believes.

But the data tells a different story

Reality, however, presents a more sobering picture: democracy is hemorrhaging support worldwide at an unprecedented pace.

Only 6.6% of the world’s population live in states defined as full democracies, while 72% live in autocracies—a historic reversal that has seen the global Democracy Index score fall from 5.52 in 2006 to an unprecedented low of 5.17 in 2024.

Even the Western democracies Ukraine aspires to join are backsliding. France’s score fell below the threshold to qualify as a “full democracy” and was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” in 2024.

The United States continues to be classified as a “flawed democracy,” ranked 28th globally. Hungary has recorded the biggest decline ever measured, plummeting to become a “transitional” or “hybrid regime.” When weighted by population, the level of democracy in Europe has fallen back forty years, to where it was in 1978.

Between 2020 and 2024, in one in five elections worldwide, losing candidates publicly rejected the outcome.

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Democracy’s three critical ailments

Despite this grim landscape, Timothy Garton Ash maintains his diagnosis offers hope. The historian identifies three fundamental weaknesses that have made democracies vulnerable to authoritarian assault:

1. Democracy degrading into oligarchy

“The great achievement of modern liberal democracy was to separate wealth and power,” Ash explained. “Most of human history, wealth and power have gone together. In oligarchy, they come back together.”

Ukraine knows this threat intimately from its own struggle with oligarchs. But even in established democracies, the lines are blurring dangerously. “Now, even in the United States, we see, with Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and all the tech bros, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and others, lining up to support him, democracy degrading into oligarchy.”

2. Liberalism creating its own resistance

The second ailment emerges from democracy’s own successes. “What was associated with liberalism over the last 40 years, in particular neoliberalism, globalized, financialized capitalism, but to some extent also identity politics, left a huge part of our societies, in countries like Britain or America, feeling both economically and culturally neglected.”

Into this vacuum step the populists, who revolt against the “liberal cosmopolitan elites” and the big cities.

“They say, we hear you. We’re on your side. And they counterpose democracy to liberalism.” They claim to speak for “the people”—but as Ash notes, “it’s not the whole people. It’s only one part of the people.”

Trump himself once distinguished between “the people, and then there are the other people. And the other people are the bloody foreigners, quote, unquote. The immigrants, the outsiders, the others.”

3. Fragmentation of the public sphere

Democracy depends on shared reality, Ash argues, invoking ancient Athens: “All the citizens meet on the Pnyx. They hear all the facts. They can debate freely all the different policy options. And then together they decide to fight the invading Persians on sea rather than on land, which is how they win the Battle of Salamis.”

Today’s digital revolution has shattered this foundation.

“What’s happened over the years over the last 40 years is because of the digital revolution in media, we have the phenomenon of both monopoly, Facebook, Google, and fragmentation, so that we are losing the kind of public sphere, the kind of information environment you need for democracy to flourish.”

Ash’s seven-point prescription to save democracy

Ash’s remedy is both pragmatic and urgent:

1. “Tough on populism, tough on the causes of populism.” Address the genuine economic and cultural neglect that feeds populist resentment rather than dismissing it.

2. Strengthen all pluralist, anti-majoritarian institutions.”The independence of the courts, the civil service, auditors, obviously the different houses of parliament, and so on and so forth. These are the things that are coming under attack now, for example, in Trump’s America, and have been eroded in countries like Hungary.”

3. Learn from success. “Poland, two years ago, was very close to going down the Hungarian path, to state capture, to the demolition step-by-step of liberal democracy, and they came back. How? By winning an election that was not wholly free and fair. More people turned out to vote than ever before. More young people than old. More women than men voted in that election.”

4. Rebuild the media environment. “If you have public service media worthy of the name, hang on to them for dear life, strengthen their editorial independence, and quadruple the budget.” Ash credits the BBC with helping Britain avoid America’s fate: “You in Ukraine have Suspilne. Hang on to it for dear life. Strengthen its editorial independence. Quadruple the budget.”

5. Keep looking for what people have in common. “You’re going to have this problem in Ukraine in the next few years when the hot phase of the war is over… there’s a big danger of all the tensions and divisions in Ukrainian society coming to the surface. So keep looking for the things that keep people together.”

6. Don’t try to out-populist the populists. “It never works. We know that. If you adopt the rhetoric of the populists, if you do the dog whistle to the populists, voters will say, why should I vote for the dog whistle when I can have the real dog? It only strengthens the Marine Le Pens and the AFDs and the Nigel Farages.”

7. Don’t collaborate, even in very small ways. Drawing on Václav Havel’s wisdom: “Every dictatorship, every authoritarian regime isn’t just built on force. It’s built on these thousands and millions of tiny individual acts of collaboration. So don’t collaborate, even in the smallest way.”

The Ukrainian test case: when optimism meets reality

Ash’s confidence in democracy’s resilience faces its ultimate test in Ukraine. While he speaks of democracy’s long-term victory, Ukrainian survival depends on short-term Western commitment—commitment that’s eroding as anti-democratic populists gain power across the democratic world.

The very democratic backsliding Ash diagnoses is producing leaders hostile to Ukrainian aid. In Poland, despite historical solidarity, anti-Ukrainian sentiment is rising among voters frustrated with economic pressures, culminating in the victory of Karol Nawrocki, who has questioned Ukraine’s EU and NATO aspirations.

Slovakia’s Robert Fico has explicitly cut aid and adopted a Russia-friendly stance.

Romania’s Călin Georgescu, a pro-Putin candidate who praised Russian values and opposed NATO support for Ukraine, won the first round of presidential elections before the vote was annulled due to Russian interference. His political ally George Simion then ran in the 2025 rerun and lost by just 7% in May 2025—meaning pro-Putin forces came within single digits of controlling a NATO country bordering Ukraine.

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In the United States, Donald Trump promises “peace deals” that would reward Russian aggression by forcing Ukraine to cede territory.

Ukrainian soldiers die defending democratic ideals while voters in those same democracies choose leaders who would abandon Ukraine to Putin’s sphere of influence—exactly what happened to Georgia after its 2008 war with Russia.

The brutal mathematics are stark. Ukraine’s European integration depends on sustained Western support, but the rise of anti-democratic populists—fueled by the very ailments Ash identifies—is putting that support in jeopardy. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has already blocked EU aid packages. The Trump administration is raising suspicions of directly serving Putin’s interests. The recent Polish election of Nawrocki is sure to send shockwaves regarding supporting Ukraine through Europe.

If Ash is wrong about democracy’s resilience, if the current crisis represents not growing pains but terminal decline, Ukraine faces a choice starker than any since independence: submit to Russian domination or stand alone against an empire. No less than centuries of Ukraine’s national liberation struggle hang in the balance.

The historian’s gamble

Ash’s seven-point plan may be academically sound, and his historical perspective offers valuable long-term hope. But for Ukraine, the timeline of democratic recovery matters as much as its ultimate success. His prescription assumes democracies have the luxury of time to heal themselves—time Ukraine may not have as Western support wavers and Russian pressure intensifies.

The historian’s optimism about democracy’s eventual triumph rings hollow when Ukraine’s immediate survival depends on democracies that are currently failing his own diagnostic tests. While Ash speaks confidently about democracy being “on the winning team,” Ukrainian leaders must plan for the possibility that the team might forfeit the game before victory arrives.

For Ukraine, Timothy Garton Ash’s confidence isn’t just an academic question—it’s an existential gamble. If he’s right, Ukraine’s democratic aspirations will eventually be vindicated. If he’s wrong, they may not survive to see it.

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