In the early 2000s, Georgia was hailed, if not as a libertarian haven, then at least as a place where libertarian experiments in government were possible. The seeds for Georgia’s libertarian trajectory were planted under Mikheil Saakashvili and his closest circle following the Rose Revolution, which brought Mikheil Saakashvili to power. The Cato Institute, one of the most prominent American libertarian think tanks, once described Saakashvili as “a free marketer who studied Hayek and Milton Friedman and learned from the successes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.” Saakashvili’s mingling with the political right might be why he allowed some of his libertarian associates to enact several libertarian reforms in the 2000s.
At the most fundamental level, to be a libertarian is to embrace three principal things: the free market, minimal government, and the sovereignty of the individual. Kakha Bendukidze, Saakashvili’s economy minister who oversaw Georgia’s economic transformation following the Rose Revolution and the architect of Georgia’s libertarianism, put it even more bluntly: “The point of libertarianism is not to smile when you hear: “What’s bad about the state trying to do something good? The point is to say that the state’s attempt to do something good is very harmful.” Consequently, the ideology behind Georgia’s libertarian economic transition in the early 2000s was “making everything private as much as possible.”
The roots for this post-Soviet libertarian turn lie in the Georgian libertarians’ distaste for Soviet economic planning. The authoritarianism of the Soviet Union was simply too suffocating, the state’s economic policies were inefficient, and networks of corruption – formal and informal – halted the implementation of actual reforms. The old system needed to be disbanded as soon as possible to revive the struggling economy in the 1990s and the early 2000s. And libertarianism provided an avenue for doing exactly that.
Liberty, drugs, stigma
The youth activists I spoke to confidently noted that most young Georgians today subscribe to libertarian values. But is this true? What does it mean to be young and libertarian in Georgia?
In 2016, a new group of post-Saakashvili libertarians led by Zurab Japaridze would emerge on Georgia’s political scene. They would be known as pinecone – Girchi in Georgian – and the party would soon become known as Georgia’s “right-wing youth party.”* Girchi was able to tap into Georgia’s younger voter base who were hungry for change – in 2020, 70 to 75 percent of its supporters were between ages 18 and 34. Girchi did it by pressing on many sore spots and tabooed issues of Georgian politics: military service, strict drug laws, marriage equality, sex work, and others. As such, the legalization of marijuana, doing away with conscription, and LGBT rights were hauled to the forefront of Girchi’s social agenda as it contested power in the late 2010s.
As Tinatin Bolokadze, the founder of the Institute for Individual Liberty, a libertarian think-tank, told me, “One of the most significant catalysts for the growth of libertarianism among Georgian youth was the country’s drug policy,” which has historically been extremely stringent. To talk about drugs in Georgia is to veer into dangerous territory.
Girchi’s bold moves might be the reason why contemporary libertarian groups have so frequently been demonized by the government and in government-funded media, Dachi Shalvashvili, member of Ayn Rand Center Georgia, told me: “In the case of libertarianism, government propaganda is mostly based on calling libertarians drug addicts.”
Ideological mix-ups
These days, Georgian “libertarians have blended in with classical liberals,” Shalvashili remarked. Surprisingly, the very act of choosing to describe oneself as a libertarian in Georgia carries a lot of stigma, as Mariam Berdzenishvili, Coordinator for Georgian Students for Liberty, a student association, told us. She prefers to identify as a classical liberal “even though both terms in scholarly literature represent the exact same ideas and can be used interchangeably.”
“There is a big government propaganda in Georgia framing libertarianism as ‘unserious’ and ‘radical,’ which is why most libertarians like to say they are classical liberals,” she said.
Other youth activists speak of a different experience of finding one’s position on the political spectrum. The Franklin Club, which promotes libertarian and classical liberal ideas in Georgia, “tries to be more pragmatic about politics,” Aleksander Zibzibadze, co-founder of the organization, remarked. “Many of our classical liberal friends have criticized us and said we’re not real libertarians.”
Most libertarians refuse to identify with the conservative movement, which is usually incorrectly associated with libertarian ideology itself. This is a direct result of the skewed views on what libertarianism actually means, a byproduct of the influence that the rapidly radicalizing United States’ Republican Party has had on conservative and right-wing movements around the globe, including Georgia. Berdzenishvili told me that, for example, the Georgian conservative movement “consists of religious radicals, promoting violence on the streets, especially towards LGBTQ+ groups during Pride.”
When asked about differences across the ideological spectrum, Bolokadze said that “the creative and fun methods” that young libertarians have adopted in their activist efforts set them apart from other political groups. This emphasis on unconventional activism is true for Georgian libertarian politics in general. Famously, Girchi’s Japaridze passed out joints in 2018 during a cannabis legalization festival to protest Georgia’s drug laws, and the party opened the ersatz “Christian, Evangelical, Protestant Biblical Freedom Church of Georgia” to help young Georgian men evade conscription.
Educating the youth
Policy issues, however, have often been put on the back burner by young libertarian activists. Most libertarian youth groups – such as the Ayn Rand Center, Franklin Club, Students for Liberty, and others – focus on educational projects, teaching Georgian youth about economics, politics, international relations, and ideologies.
They see the Georgian secondary education system as the main cause of the Georgian youth’s inability to think critically about politics. “Georgian schools don’t provide good quality civic education to their students,” Zibzibadze said. The schools are a remnant of the antiquated Soviet education system, which notoriously stifled disagreement, dissent, and discussion in the classroom. As such, getting more educated about politics – a topic that rarely appears in school curricula – has pulled many students toward these activist groups, as Zibzibadze noted. What is more, they also provide a sense of community. These libertarian youth organizations, such as the Franklin Club, often pride themselves on their large alumni networks formed through mass student participation.
Still, “libertarian activism is not very public,” Shalvashvili said. Others disagree – Bolokadze argued that “in many ways, every libertarian in Georgia acts as a politician, seizing opportunities to discuss and promote their ideology whenever possible.”
The libertarians’ educational initiatives have yielded some fruit. “Most people today advocate for right-wing economics and minimal government intervention,” Berdzenishvili says. She explains this turn to libertarianism by noting the increased opportunities for non-formal education that Gen Z’ers are able to engage in due to the educational work spearheaded by libertarian youth organizations. Beyond educational programs, these groups organize camps, conferences, and weekend schools, which have also previously been attacked by pro-government mobs, further highlighting the severity and scale of the soaring conflict between youth libertarian activists and the Georgian government. This violence would very rapidly come to a head during the protests against the foreign agents law in 2023.
Libertarians take to the streets
The protests bore witness to the “profound anger of Georgian youth, especially among libertarians,” Bolokadze told me. The point was to never again “allow the government to trample on their rights, and their daily battle against such oppression continues.”
Young Georgians’ turn to libertarian politics might have a broader historical context. “Georgian history has taught its people the importance of resisting authoritarian control, a sentiment rooted in the country’s pre-1921 era when decentralization and self-defense were valued,” Bolokadze said. Therefore, the idea of the necessity of self-government, which became a crucial part of Georgian nation-building in the 20th century, can offer another historical point of reference for contemporary youth libertarian activists.
Interestingly, the government’s attempts to pass the Foreign Agents Law in both 2023 and 2024 prompted left- and right-leaning youth to unite and rally against the law and the government’s authoritarian tendencies. When it comes to forging friends across the ideological spectrum during the mass protests, Berdzenishvili said that “opposing the pro-Russian puppet regime in Georgia was the goal of both left-wing green NGOs and right-wing liberal NGOs.” The protests, above all, united Gen Z’ers all across the ideological spectrum. Libertarians marched with Marxists and feminists with classical liberals.
“We all realized that if the law is still there, this government is going to be very repressive. There will be no room at all for us to fight and discuss ideological differences. So, for now, we try to fight against the pro-Russian government, and I think, after it, there will be much more room for ideological politics in Georgia in general,” Zibzibadze said.
More generally reflecting on challenges brought by the increasingly repressive nature of the Georgian government, Berdzenishvili said that media is most often at fault. During the protests, she was accused of working to overthrow the government, and she vividly remembers how this year’s LibertyCon Europe – Europe’s largest classical liberal conference, which was held in Tbilisi under the watchful eye of the Georgian security services – was criticized for spreading “revolutionary agenda” by the government. Media outlets friendly to the government “spread misinformation about our organization, as well as the whole libertarian movement in Georgia.”
Thinking about the future
“I see the Georgian electorate growing out of the dream of the ‘Nanny State’ that should provide everything for us,” Berdzenishvili said. She wants Georgians to take matters into their own hands, noting that the protests “demonstrated the fact that everyone understood the importance of individual contribution to the common good.”
When it comes to specific policy positions, libertarians seek to reduce or at least simplify the tax system, and they see their ideology as a solution to government corruption. “What Georgia needs,” in Berdzenishvili’s opinion, is a “decentralized political model.” They want to see increased privatization, decentralization, judicial reform, and very minimal government. “We believe that focusing on these main areas will make Georgia richer and more developed,” Bolokadze told me.
“We have a plan to make Georgia libertarian, and we are confident that we will overcome these challenges,” Bolokadze tells us, but for Zibzibadze, his libertarian outlook on Georgia’s future is much more grounded. “I want Georgia to be a country where every parent could afford to take their child to Disneyland at least once a year,” he says.
* Since 2020, after the split of Girchi, Japaridze became the leader of the party that is officially known as Girchi-More Freedom.
Ričards Umbraško is a student at Harvard University. He is currently interning at Civil.ge.
