This German grey eminence is trying for another color revolution

The Caucasus country of Georgia has had elections, and they did not go the way Western elites wanted. The governing Georgian Dream party, routinely derided in the West as “pro-Russian” and “anti-Western,” has won with 54% of the vote; an opposition alliance, extolled as “pro-Western” and in particular “pro-EU” has lost with less than 38%. The opposition alleges election irregularities big enough to invalidate the result; the government acknowledges some irregularities but points out that they happen everywhere and argues they are not significant enough to challenge its “landslide” win.

At the same time, Georgia sits on a classical geopolitical fault line between, for want of better words, East and West. In principle, that kind of situation could be managed, even exploited to a country’s benefit. In Georgia’s case, however, it was made much worse, as in the case of Ukraine, by the West’s, at best, reckless overreach enshrined in the 2008 Bucharest NATO summit decision to offer a vague yet explosive NATO perspective.

Think what you will of Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder and eminence grise Bidzina Ivanishvili, but he is right that this gratuitous and shortsighted NATO policy posed an enormous danger to both his country and Ukraine. In both cases, it contributed massively to the outbreak of war (in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014). He may also be correct that it was motivated by something even worse than arrogant sloppiness; namely a cynical, premeditated Western strategy to sacrifice or at least risk these countries as expendable pawns on the grand chessboard of geopolitics. 

Never mind that Georgian Dream is not actually against the EU, but just not unconditionally submissive toward it. In reality, it is the EU that has massively tried to interfere in the elections (via threats to Georgians’ visa privileges, among other things) and de facto suspended Georgia’s candidacy. And never mind also that Georgian Dream is not “pro-Russian” either. In reality, its signature style is to seek to maintain useful relationships with everyone. Its real sin, in the eyes of the West is that it is not anti-Russian, like the opposition. It is the West that is trying to impose an exclusive relationship on a country that is far better off with a foreign policy that works with and balances all relevant power centers, investors, and potential threats. Forcing Georgia to abandon this eminently sensible course is the real ambition of the West; and it will probably fail.

The upshot of all of the above is that now a “color revolution” coup attempt is in the air. So far, so dull. The Western “playbook” – to use a term beloved by those raging at Russia – is dog-eared, stained, and tattered with overuse. And yet, as one sign of insanity is obsessive repetition, here we are once more: The “pro-Western” opposition is now led, in effect, by a president, Salome Zourabichvili, originally parachuted in from the West, a literal foreign agent who still doesn’t speak native-level Georgian. She claims that Georgian Dream’s victory is so compromised by irregularities that it is fraudulent. And, more importantly, she asserts that – wait for it! – it is big bad Russia, once again, that is to blame. Most importantly, she has struck an extreme, uncompromising tone that leaves no room for ending this crisis with a compromise. At the same time, also in true “color revolution” style, the opposition is trying to mobilize two main forces to bring down the government: demonstrations in the capital city, as well as Western pressure and meddling. 

On both counts, the opposition’s immediate success has been limited: The demonstrations are not big and at least the first reactions of the US and the EU leaderships have been verbose, but if you look closely, conspicuously cautious in substance, as the Financial Times editorial board has lamented. Meanwhile, Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, which currently holds the European Council presidency, has visited Georgia in a show of support for the government. As so often, he is an outsider in the EU and his initiative has been widely disavowed. But then, he cannot be stopped either. If a “color revolution” is the plan, the first 48 hours after the elections have not indicated good prospects for it.

In this situation, tense, unresolved, and with the potential for serious violence, enter Michael Roth to do his worst. Roth, to his chagrin, may not be a household name outside Germany, but within its political and intellectual confines he has played a regrettably large role. An important member of the SPD party, which, at least formally, leads the current ruling coalition, Roth has been the chair of the German parliament’s foreign policy committee since 2021.

In this role, he has consistently been a hardliner. Obsessed with the war in Ukraine, for instance, he has reliably argued for military escalation over diplomacy and negotiations. Regarding the genocide and war crimes committed by Israel and its supporters (very much including Germany), he has been fanatically pro-Zionist, sharing one Israeli propaganda talking point after the other and slandering critics of Israel and its mass murder spree as “antisemites.”

Concerning Georgia, Roth’s involvement has long displayed a compulsive streak. During the violent protests against the country’s perfectly legal – and rather mild – transparency law this spring, Roth had to make an appearance on the streets of Tbilisi and do his best Victoria Nuland impression – and then talk about it, a lot. Roth deeply, messianically believes that he, an intellectually rather insular apparatchik from Berlin, knows best what is right for Georgia, and anyone disagreeing with him – including in Georgia – is either a “useful idiot” of Russia or just bought by it.

In his fresh intervention regarding the Caucasus nation, as delivered in an interview with the Deutschlandfunk radio station, Roth’s positions are a mix of the lazily predictable – and predictably misguided – and, sometimes, shockingly arrogant, even by his standards. In and of themselves, they hardly merit attention. Yet they are interesting if we read them as what they really are: not the expression of an individual mind, which is not Roth’s forte, but of a group think widely shared among not only German but EU “elites.”

Roth, of course, reiterates the usual Western talking points, namely that the Georgian election was stolen by what – with a grindingly plodding effort at wit – he calls “Georgian Nightmare” (instead of “Dream” – get it?); that Russia is behind it all; and that, finally, nothing will help except fresh elections. Meaning, of course, annulling the results of the ones that have already taken place. Like the hawks at Financial Times moreover, Roth also feels “very disappointed” by the initial official response from the EU, which he accuses of being too soft. One thing he demands, from his perch in Berlin, is not recognizing the election results. Less than that, and Michael will throw a tantrum.

Asked if he sees parallels with very recent Ukrainian history, Roth evades the obvious key issue: the question whether Western meddling could “help” Georgia to end up as ruined as Ukraine by coup and proxy war. Clearly smelling a trap, he prefers, he says, to compare Georgia and Belarus, going as far as to warn of the “Belarusification” of the Caucasus state. Whatever that may stand for in his mind, it is telling that, in the same interview, it is Roth who has a Freudian lapse and speaks of the people of Georgia as those “in Ukrai…” before barely catching himself on the last syllable. Clearly, for the master thinker from Germany, ultimately, it is all the same, a jumble of places to the east, which share that they must serve as battlegrounds for his Snyderian-Applebaumian fantasies of showing the Russians and scoring points against what he calls, with touching self-unawareness, their “imperialism.” 

For Roth, Georgians as such and their lives and challenges do not really exist. While he professes his support for the “very many” who want into the EU, the others don’t interest him. But even those who find his favor by displaying the “correct” attitudes, are, ultimately, tools or one-dimensional cardboard characters to him. He simply denies that the elections had anything to do with real-life issues, such as “social or education policies.”

That cannot be, because, in the Rothoverse, proper Georgians only care about what he cares about, namely hackneyed, highfalutin’, and discredited narratives of EU “values.” And if the EU leadership won’t pull itself together the way Roth demands, then he turns those same Georgians into an amorphous mass of potential migrants with which to scare Brussels into action: “If the EU does not come to Georgia,” he warns, “then all the young [Georgians] will come to us.” Whether at home or on the move, for Roth, Georgians are a source of leverage, be it against Russia, or if necessary, even against the EU. 

In the same vein, he labels the election results a “heavy blow” not only for Georgia but “for Europe,” insisting that they are not “anything we [my emphasis] can work with.” It is hard to think of a more naively revealing way of not saying but still hollering that what matters in the final analysis is “Europe,” which, in turn, is really just a word for Roth’s own political and ideological desires, frustrations, and hang-ups.

And it’s not as if Roth cannot see how dangerous all of this is. With respect to Moldova, he actually admits that it is “deeply split” over the issue of EU accession. Regarding Georgia, even he has noticed that “violence” cannot be excluded. And yet, nothing ever makes him question his own simplistic and selfish assumptions. Hiding in plain sight behind his rhetoric of solidarity and “standing with the people” in Georgia is the same false and condescending kind of friendship that has lured Ukraine to its ruin.

Yet this myopic and arrogant self-centeredness of such Western friends from hell is more than a personal bug. It’s a systemic feature that ironically is also undermining the authority and position of Western elites at home. Take for instance another recent interview with Roth. A self-defeatingly vain man, for this meeting he shamelessly commandeered as background to his personal magnificence the central Berlin monument to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust – proudly displaying personal, perfectly improper clout to ward off attendants who were rightly objecting. It is not only Georgians or Ukrainians who must cede place to Roth’s ego. So does the memory of the victims of the Holocaust and those who want to guard it from distressingly improper use.

Roth is incapable of genuinely recognizing his own mistakes. But he has the capacity to acknowledge frustration when his erroneous policies fail to find the complete support that he never doubts they deserve. In an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel a month ago, he lamented that he had “not succeeded in explaining how to really achieve peace in Ukraine, namely… by strength and military capability.” Too many Germans, he clearly feels, are still not belligerent enough. Even more shockingly, “a dangerous vacuum” has opened up, “in which the supporters of Ukraine are being discredited as warmongers.” Let’s disregard the physics of the Rothoverse, where the void houses his critics. In the land of Annalena “360-degree” Baerbock, Roth, after all, is not the first German politician displaying a disturbing lack of elementary familiarity with the exact sciences. 

What he was really trying to complain about with that confused simile was that, scandalously, those not agreeing with him still have a right to speak up in Germany. At least he knows who is to blame. Yes, Russia, of course. But apart from Russia, also other Germans. In particular, Sarah Wagenknecht and her party, the BSW. According to Roth, they have “hijacked the concept of peace.” And even those in Roth’s own party, the SPD, are guilty: If they dare diverge from his line by showing up at a demonstration for peace, he charges them with promoting a “calamitous shifting of the discourse,” a complicated way of saying that they don’t share his opinions.         

The bottom line is that when things – fortunately – do not turn out the way Roth wants, even his regrets are self-serving. In effect, he blames citizens and voters, as well as those political opponents (and friends, too) who disagree with him and are doing a better job at convincing those voters. The thought that he might simply be wrong never enters his head. Roth is, in other words, a perfect representative of the narcissistic and obstinately self-righteous “elites” that the EU way of life fosters.

The tragedy – or comedy – is of course that it is exactly that kind of politician that is the worst danger to the EU itself because what Roth dismisses as “populism” and “Russian influence” is in reality to a large extent a rebellion against precisely his type of politician and apparatchik: selfish, ideologically doctrinaire and self-righteous, and perfectly incapable of the humility that true listening and learning would require.