Georgia's constitution orders a course toward the EU and NATO

What the Georgian constitution asks of every institution

Chapter Eleven of the Georgian constitution, headed transitional provisions, holds a single article. Article 78 says that "the constitutional bodies shall take all measures within the scope of their competences to ensure the full integration of Georgia into the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization." It sets no deadline and names no body in particular. It sits in the text as revised in 2018, under a preamble that claims the legal legacy of the Georgian constitution of 1921.

The article wrote down a course Georgian governments had already been following. Georgia joined the Council of Europe on 27 April 1999 and the World Trade Organization on 14 June 2000. NATO's North Atlantic Council approved an Individual Partnership Action Plan for Georgia on 29 October 2004, named it an aspirant country in 2011, and has organised cooperation since 2014 through the Substantial NATO-Georgia Package. Georgian soldiers served in the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, 1,560 of them in 2013; more than 11,000 rotated through over the course of the war, and 32 were killed.

The European track moved faster after 2014. An Association Agreement signed in June 2014 entered into force on 1 July 2016, and in February 2017 the Council of the European Union adopted visa-free travel for Georgians for stays of 90 days in any 180. Georgia applied for membership on 3 March 2022, soon after Russia's invasion of Ukraine began. Ukraine and Moldova received candidate status within months. Georgia received a list of conditions on judicial reform, the rule of law, the influence of oligarchs and a polarised political and media climate, and was granted candidate status in December 2023 with free and fair parliamentary elections in 2024 among the conditions for opening talks.

Russia appears nowhere in Article 78. It recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia as states on 26 August 2008, Georgia broke off diplomatic relations, and Georgia holds that both regions are occupied. In 2022 Georgia gave Ukraine diplomatic and humanitarian support and declined to join the sanctions other states imposed on Russia. Britannica describes the division at home in two halves: many Georgians favour a Western orientation, while others see greater opportunity in closer relations with Russia and resent what they regard as Western attempts to impose cultural norms.

How Georgia moved power from president to parliament

The constitution adopted in 1995 created a strong presidency. Eduard Shevardnadze won the office that November with 75% of the vote, and his Citizens' Union of Georgia took 107 of the 231 seats in parliament. He was re-elected in 2000 and forced out in November 2003 by the Rose Revolution, which followed parliamentary elections on 2 November that the opposition and international monitors said were marred by fraud. Mikheil Saakashvili, who led the protests with Zurab Zhvania and Nino Burjanadze, was elected president in 2004.

Amendments passed in 2010 began to move power the other way. They transferred executive authority from the president to the prime minister, with effect from the inauguration of the next president, which followed the election of October 2013. In between came the parliamentary election of October 2012 and the first peaceful electoral transfer of power in Georgia: the Georgian Dream coalition won 55% of the vote and 85 of the 150 seats against Saakashvili's United National Movement, and for a year a president from one camp shared power with a government from the other.

The reforms of 2017 completed the move by taking the presidency off the ballot. The president remains head of state, commander in chief and, in the constitution's words, "the guarantor of the country's unity and national independence". Article 50 now has the office filled for five years by an Electoral College of 300: every member of parliament, the members of the supreme representative bodies of the autonomous republics of Abkhazia and Ajara, and local councillors nominated by parties in proportion to their share of the local vote. A candidate needs 30 nominations and wins outright with two thirds of all 300 votes, or else in a run-off between the two leaders. The college votes openly and without debate.

Salome Zurabishvili, who won a run-off in 2018 with 59% of the vote, was the last president chosen at the polls. The college first sat on 14 December 2024. The opposition boycotted it after the disputed parliamentary election that October, the one candidate had the backing of Georgian Dream and was credited with 100% of the votes, and the outgoing president called the result illegitimate because the college rested on the new parliament.

Under Article 53 every legal act of the president needs a prime minister's countersignature, apart from a short list. Without one, the president may call elections and dissolve parliament, appoint the prime minister parliament has voted for, sign laws or send them back with remarks, appoint three of the nine Constitutional Court judges and pardon convicts.

Why Georgia kept rewriting its electoral rules

Between 2017 and 2020 the rules for electing the Georgian parliament were rewritten three times, and each version was argued over as a question of who would govern next. The parallel system in use at the election of October 2016 filled 73 seats in single-member districts and 77 from party lists. Georgian Dream took less than half the vote and 115 of the 150 seats, and the distance between those two figures became the opposition's central complaint.

The constitutional reform of October 2017 answered with a fully proportional parliament and then put it off. After criticism from the Council of Europe's Venice Commission, parliament agreed in March 2018 to a list system with a 5% threshold from 2024, and to one more election in 2020 on 73 districts and 77 list seats with a 3% threshold. The governing party argued that proportional representation needed a mature party system and should come in gradually. Davit Zedelashvili, a law professor at the University of Georgia, wrote in 2020 that the delay was meant to weaken the United National Movement before the new rules took effect.

How the protests of June changed the count

Street protests reopened the question in 2019. On 20 June special forces dispersed a rally outside parliament, called after a Russian legislator addressed an assembly of Orthodox parliamentarians from the speaker's seat, and the protests that followed demanded proportional elections at once. A constitutional amendment to that effect failed at its first reading in November 2019. With the European Union and the United States pressing both sides, the governing party and the opposition agreed a compromise on 8 March 2020, and parliament adopted it as constitutional amendments on 29 June 2020.

The compromise also limited the bonus seats handed to the strongest parties from the unallocated remainder, so that a party with less than 40% of the list vote could not reach a majority through them. In October 2020 Georgian Dream took 48% of the vote, much as in 2016, and 90 seats, and nine parties entered parliament. The opposition alleged fraud and refused to take part in the new parliament; an agreement brokered by the European Union in April 2021 eased the crisis for a time, and both large parties had walked away from it within months.

What the constitution now fixes

Article 37 sets the parliament at 150 members elected for four years in one nationwide constituency, with seats shared among the parties that clear 5% of the valid vote and any seats left over going to the best-placed parties in turn. A second guard sits in Article 60: the Constitutional Court may not strike down an electoral rule during an election year unless the rule itself was adopted within 15 months of that election. In May 2024 parliament overrode a presidential veto to abolish the quota, introduced in 2020, that required at least one candidate of a different gender among every four on a party list.

Why the Georgian opposition gave up its seats

Eighteen parties and coalitions contested the election of 26 October 2024, the first held wholly on party lists. Of 3,508,294 registered voters, 2,060,412 voted, a turnout of 58.7%. The Central Election Commission's results gave Georgian Dream 89 of the 150 seats. Four opposition groups shared the other 61, and all four had signed the Georgian Charter, a programme the president had put forward that year calling for the repeal of laws that would delay accession and for a fresh election after reforms.

The opposition rejected the count and asked for a new election under international supervision. The commission recounted ballots at about 14% of polling stations in late October and confirmed the results on 16 November; two days later the president asked the Constitutional Court to annul them. The prime minister of the day said the vote had been free and fair.

Freedom House, in its report for 2025, recorded what observers had found: ballot secrecy broken in many places because of the physical design of the voting materials, widespread reports of vote buying, and intimidation at polling stations. One lower court upheld a complaint about ballot secrecy, and the appeal courts rejected the consolidated complaints and upheld the results. Eight months before the vote, against the Venice Commission's advice, parliament had moved the nomination of nonpartisan election commissioners from the president to the speaker and abolished the deputy chair's post that opposition nominees had filled.

All the elected opposition groups boycotted the new parliament. On 5 February 2025 parliament revoked the mandates of 49 opposition members at their own written request, leaving 101 sitting members of 150. On 2 July 2025 it ended 12 more mandates, which left 89, and on 2 September 2025 it recognised 12 other opposition mandates, bringing the number back to 101. Article 3 forbids any law or constitutional amendment from lengthening or shortening an elected body's term, so the next regular election falls in October 2028.

How the accession pause split Georgia's institutions

Georgian Dream campaigned in 2024 on a promise to continue accession talks, and supporters at some of its rallies carried flags combining the party's emblem with that of the European Union. Relations with Brussels had worsened before the vote. In April 2024 the party reintroduced a bill requiring non-governmental organisations and media outlets that take more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as "agents of foreign influence"; parliament passed it over the president's veto and it took effect in August. The European Union halted Georgia's accession process in June 2024. The United States sanctioned Georgian officials that September, and in the same month parliament adopted a law on "family values and the protection of minors" restricting the rights of LGBT people, which the speaker signed into law in October after the president refused to.

Days after the new parliament was seated in late November 2024, the prime minister announced that the government would not pursue accession talks until 2028, citing blackmail. Protests followed through December. Freedom House recorded that the authorities answered them with violence, fines and imprisonment, that human rights groups reported torture in police custody, and that parliament closed the year with new fines and detention for protest offences involving masks, posters and blocked traffic.

The quarrel between the two ends of the executive was older than the election. In October 2023 Georgian Dream had tried and failed to impeach the president over foreign trips the government had not authorised, trips that Britannica credits with helping to secure candidate status. After the pause she called on Western governments to support the protest movement, and she declined to recognise the transfer of the presidency in December 2024.

Freedom House scored Georgia 21 of 40 for political rights and 34 of 60 for civil liberties in its 2025 report, which covers 2024 and excludes Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In 2023 the Economist Intelligence Unit classed Georgia as a "hybrid regime", and in 2025 the V-Dem Institute classed it as an electoral autocracy for the first time. The government's position at the time was that the 2024 election had been free and fair and that the pause was a response to blackmail.

Who checks the Georgian government between elections

A Georgian government exists by parliament's confidence. After an election the party with the best result nominates a prime minister, who has two weeks to win a majority of all members for a cabinet and a programme, and failure leads to dissolution and a fresh vote. Removal works the same way in reverse. Under Article 57 a no-confidence motion needs more than a third of all members to table it, must name a replacement prime minister, and passes only when parliament votes that replacement in. Members who fail may not try again for six months.

The Constitutional Court has nine judges serving ten years, three appointed by the president, three elected by parliament on a three-fifths vote and three appointed by the Supreme Court. Individuals may bring claims that a law breaches their constitutional rights, and a fifth of members of parliament may challenge any law. The Supreme Court has at least 28 judges, elected for life by parliament on nomination by the High Council of Justice, a body of 14 members plus the Supreme Court's chair, more than half of them chosen by the judges themselves. Freedom House describes a small group of judges controlling the rest; the United States sanctioned four of them in 2023, and in July 2024 the Tbilisi City Court blocked the president's appointment to the council.

The constitution itself changes under Article 77. An amendment needs two thirds of all members of parliament and then the same two thirds, without changes, in the next parliament, or three quarters of all members in one parliament. Georgian Dream's 115 seats after 2016 cleared the three-quarters line, and Zedelashvili described the 2017 reform as pushed through unilaterally. The 89 seats won in 2024 fall short of two thirds.

Article 8 recognises "the outstanding role" of the Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Georgia in the country's history and its independence from the state, and leaves the relationship to a constitutional agreement that the president concludes. Before the 2024 election Georgian Dream proposed making Orthodox Christianity the state religion.

How the constitution plans for regions outside Tbilisi's control

Much of the text is written for a country larger than the one Tbilisi administers. Article 37 promises a second chamber once Georgia's jurisdiction is restored over all its territory: a Council of the Republic elected by proportional representation and a Senate drawn from Abkhazia, Ajara and the other territorial units, with five members appointed by the president. Until then parliament sits as one chamber of 150. Article 7 postpones the final territorial arrangement of the state to the same moment, and Article 77 lets a constitutional law on restoring territorial integrity pass with two thirds of one parliament, skipping the second vote every other amendment needs.

The two autonomous republics have had opposite histories. Ajara returned to central control in mid-2004, when Saakashvili forced its leader from power, and its supreme representative body now sends members to the presidential Electoral College. Abkhazia has been outside Tbilisi's control since the wars of the early 1990s, yet the constitution still names Abkhazian as an official language there alongside Georgian. South Ossetia, whose autonomy was revoked in 1990, appears in Article 1 only as a former autonomous region, and Georgia calls it the Tskhinvali region. Below them the country is divided into nine regions and the capital, and further into 67 districts and five self-governing cities.

The unresolved territory reaches into foreign policy. In September 2019 the Russian foreign minister was quoted saying that if NATO admitted Georgia with collective defence covering only the territory Tbilisi administers, Russia "will not start a war" but relations would suffer. Georgia: history follows the wars that produced the line, and Georgia: geography how much of the coast lies on each side of it.