TBILISI -- Spurred by intense protests a year ago that signaled growing dissatisfaction and rising political activity among young Georgians, a handful of new and disruption-minded parties are focusing on TikTok to connect with Zoomers.
They are hoping their raw-looking live streams and other scroll-stoppers can help engage Generation Z while avoiding a spending race against more established parties and personalities ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections later this year.
But even if the political newbies can grow and thrive on TikTok, it is unclear if they'll be able to use it successfully to tap into long-running civic dissatisfaction and dislodge the ruling Georgian Dream party in an October poll. Georgian Dream has been undefeated in national elections since its founding in 2012 by a billionaire businessman.
Following protests from young people against a controversial "foreign agents" law in March 2023, "the idea was born that Generation Z had become politically active in Georgia," Dodi Kharkheli, a digital marketing specialist, told RFE/RL's Georgian Service. "Generation Z fell into the spotlight."
Chinese-owned TikTok might lag behind other social media platforms in this heavily Orthodox Caucasus nation of around 4 million people, but media tracking suggests the immediacy and high-energy irreverence that have made it a global phenomenon have attracted around half of all young Georgians to the platform.
Teething Difficulties
A little over a month ago, Iago Khvichia and others from the Girchi (Pine Cone) opposition party started daily live streams on TikTok and other platforms. They never use cameras, only phones propped awkwardly aside props such as a chainsaw-wielding bobblehead of Argentina's new right-wing populist President Javier Milei or a figurine of former U.S. President Donald Trump in his trademark MAGA hat.
Pine Cone party Chairman Khvichia has used TikTok to rail against seat belts, stray animals and unregistered pets, and the "hysteria" over COVID-19. He has also argued for the redistribution of land, water, and other state assets through mass privatization.
It's taken some getting used to, though. "We made a mistake once -- we went live with a high-quality video, that is, with three cameras, a horizontal and not a vertical shot. It had the look of a television program," Khvichia said. "People didn't watch us."
Khvichia speaks with the zeal of a convert about the platform's lively, less polished format. "TikTok has to become very familiar and natural to you," he said. "Acting doesn't work here; you're one-on-one with people of different personalities and views."
Georgia has been grappling for years with low turnout among young voters. A major household survey in 2019 known as the Caucasus Barometer suggested that 23 percent of Georgians aged 18 to 35 definitely or likely wouldn't vote in elections, which was significantly higher than among other groups.
A yearslong get-out-the-vote campaign by the country's Central Election Commission appeared to show little or no success, as 25 percent of the same age group in 2021 said they hadn't voted in parliamentary elections. More than one in three (35 percent) said they believed the elections were conducted "not at all fairly."
Many feel there isn't really anyone to vote for. While Georgian Dream has remained popular among only around a quarter of the electorate, the country's opposition remains mostly fractured and ineffectual, with no single party or movement regularly attracting double digits in the polls.
Pine Cone is no exception, with the libertarian-leaning, pro-EU party riven by infighting and defections ever since four lawmakers founded it in 2015 with the intention of "engaging professionals" in politics.
One of those founders, Zurab Japaridze, won just 2 percent of the vote in the 2018 presidential election on a platform of ending conscription, legalizing marijuana, and live streaming all cabinet meetings.
Two years later, Pine Cone spurned donations in favor of direct appeals via social media and performed only slightly better at nearly 3 percent nationally, earning four seats in parliament, propelled in part by a third-place showing in the capital, Tbilisi.
Japaridze then boycotted parliament and split with Pine Cone to form a new party, called Pine Cone-More Freedom, for reasons that included controversial remarks in which Kvichia complained about the arrest of a person for allegedly downloading child pornography.
Another new party, 3-year-old Droa! (It's Time!), is similarly testing the TikTok waters in hopes of improving on its sub-1 percent showing in its first electoral test, municipal voting in 2021.
The 2-year-old account of It's Time!, droa_live, features a smattering of videos from protests in support of women or Ukraine, but it is increasingly dominated by snippets of party members speaking directly to camera from the studio, accompanied by serious music.
"For a young and small party like us, TikTok is a good way to get your message and ideas to a lot of people at a low cost," Liza Davitadze, part of the It's Time! communications team, told RFE/RL's Georgian Service. She spoke about hooking viewers and authenticity, adding, "You have to be honest and adapt to the formats that the new era offers you."
But the It's Time! page has only around 5,000 followers, and many of the viewer numbers for its most overtly political appeals are in the three- or four-digit range. Its most popular video by far, with nearly 600,000 views, was a seemingly apolitical 19 seconds of celebrity watching as two It's Time! hosts sat and ate shawarma with the popular singer/actor Lela Tsurtsumia.
Older Hands
Even more established politicians are giving TikTok a go. Another of the emerging parties bidding aggressively for a TikTok following straddles the line between old and new. Giorgi Gakharia, a former Georgian Dream prime minister, founded the For Georgia party a few months after he resigned and left the ruling party in early 2021 over the arrest of prominent opposition figure Nika Melia. Gakharia has leveraged his public recognition to become the third most closely followed TikTok feed among Georgian political leaders, with 40,000 followers.
Gakharia's party colleague and lawmaker Anna Buchukuri joined TikTok to show a "human face" behind the party as it seeks to win the trust of young people, but she said she recognizes its limitations. "The best way to reach them is TikTok," she told RFE/RL. "However, criticism of politicians is inevitable regarding TikTok trends." Her most popular TikTok post -- a 35-second clip of her alongside Gakharia -- has around 640,000 views.
Predicting what will be popular on the 7-year-old video platform can be a notoriously tricky business. The bad news for parties like Pine Cone and It's Time! is that the numbers suggest familiarity drives TikTok numbers for politicians, too.
Georgia's most popular politician on TikTok is Kakha Kaladze, a charismatic former soccer player who ascended through Georgian Dream's ranks, including a brief stint as energy minister, before running successfully for Tbilisi mayor in 2017. He has accrued nearly 72,000 followers since his TikTok debut, a slick four-second wave to the camera from the elevator at City Hall.
He and his mayoral communications team routinely share ceremonial events and meet-and-greets with residents, as well as Kaladze's time with family. His most-watched TikTok clip is a birthday greeting that got more than 1 million views.
Another of the most widely followed Georgian politicians on TikTok is the 66-year-old founder of the Georgian Labor Party, Shalva Natelashvili, who only joined the platform last year. He launched with an old black-and-white clip of himself engaging in politics from the rostrum. Next was a cheerier, eight-second clip giving a victory sign and announcing, "You didn't think you'd see me on TikTok, too." That video received 1.2 million views. Now he's got more than 50,000 followers and routinely attracts tens or hundreds of thousands of views for his clips.
Taking To The Streets
Consecutive victories in national elections in 2012, 2016, and 2020 have kept Georgian Dream in the driver's seat for over a decade and dealt blows to just about all of Georgia's well-established political opposition.
After years of quietly operating from the shadows, Ivanishvili in December 2023 announced his second return to "political life" as the party's honorary chairman, followed by a shakeup that replaced a popular prime minister with a more seasoned Georgian Dream stalwart, Irakli Kobakhidze.
Georgia's French-born president, Salome Zurabishvili, won her first term in 2018 as an independent with the backing of Georgian Dream. Since then, she has clashed with the government over EU-backed reform efforts, even sparking an unsuccessful impeachment attempt in October 2023. But Zurabishvili has played down suggestions she might campaign for reelection in October as an "opposition" president.
Sporadic demonstrations against government policies have pointed to a disconnect between young people and multiple Georgian Dream governments. In recent months, people in their 20s and 30s have taken to the streets to demonstrate against perceived foot-dragging on reforms, the failure to oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the alleged silencing of political opponents.
A year ago this month, the introduction by Georgian Dream allies of a Kremlin-style measure to paint dissenters as agents of "foreign influence" drew thousands of angry demonstrators -- many of them young -- who were dispersed with tear gas and water cannons.
Some 37 percent of TikTok's global users are between 18 and 24 years of age, according to Statista figures from January. So the platform's audience includes a good chunk of Generation Z, the population born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s whose formative years were heavily shaped by the Internet.
World Population Review says that at least 82 percent of Georgians are on social media. The latest publicly available research on Georgia from the Caucasus Research Resource Center suggests TikTok (19 percent) badly trailed Facebook (69 percent), YouTube (61 percent), and Instagram (26 percent) in 2021. But even then, the survey estimated that nearly half of young people were on the Chinese platform.
But even one of the Pine Cone-More Freedom party's most popular TikTok voices acknowledges that there are limits to what politicians can achieve on the platform. From his one-room "studio" with a single camera and lights placed on stacks of books, Boris "Chele" Kurua produces videos that he claims are more educational than political. With his shaved head, thick beard, and tattooed biceps showing, Kurua mostly talks to the camera, preferring to delve into little-known historical episodes, although he sometimes flanks them with overtly political clips and subtle trolling. "It increases engagement," he says.
He has attracted around 57,000 followers by occupying what he calls "a specific niche" that distinguishes him from other politicians.
"Although politics is of interest to a certain segment of people," Kurua told RFE/RL, "it's still not an area of interest for people who lie in bed in the morning or the evening, or eat and scroll through TikTok."
