Freedom House 2021 report: “Georgia’s democracy score is now close to where it was a decade ago”

Freedom House annual Nations in Transit 2021 report  assessed Georgia’s democracy score at 3.18 out of 7, which is only 0.04 points more than in 2012 and represents a fall from 3.25 which Georgia scored last year:

Georgia’s democracy score is now close to where it was a decade ago, before the current ruling party rode to power on a wave of public frustration with the increasingly autocratic incumbents”, the report reads.   

The report stated that the arrest of opposition figure Nika Melia, as well as the opposition’s boycott of the 2020 parliamentary elections undermined Georgia’s positive reform attempts. 

Nevertheless, the opposition’s lasting refusal to claim mandates in parliament was not assessed positively either: 

This makes it all the more tragic when opposition groups in hybrid regimes feel compelled to boycott elections due to dramatically tilted playing fields, as recently occurred in Georgia and Serbia. While depriving the winners of legitimacy and drawing attention to serious abuses, boycotts also deprive voters of what little opportunity for change may remain”, the Freedom House report states. 

Georgia’s independent media score has also decreased since last year and amounted to 3.50, as opposed 3.70 in 2020. The Freedom House report attributes such a decline to the political interference and polarization that Georgian media is subjected to: 

The Georgian media environment was also affected by political interference and polarization in 2020, with the dismissal of staff members from publicly funded Adjara TV and Radio serving as a potent example of the pressure placed on journalists there”, the Freedom House report says. 

As per the findings of the Freedom in the World report 2021 that Freedom House released earlier this year, Georgia ranks among Partly Free countries with a total score of 60 points out of 100.