Alliance of Patriots of Georgia was founded on 19 December 2012. In 2014, for the first time ever, the political party gained seats in the city assembly (5.37%), while in 2016, having received 5.01% of the votes, it gained seats in Parliament.
While the declaration of openly pro-Russian foreign course did not prove successful for the United Democratic Movement in the 2016 parliamentary elections, the Alliance of Patriots consolidated by Turkophobic and Islamophobic messages. The longstanding message – ‘If Russia is an occupier, Turkey is an occupier too’ – aimed to shift focus from Georgia’s current security challenges (occupation by Russia) onto a historic occupation (occupation by Ottoman Empire) aimed at distracting attention from security threats by reopening historical trauma.
Once it gained seats in the parliament in 2016, this political party began to openly articulate messages that fit into the Kremlin’s foreign policy agenda and included: 1. An initiative about military neutrality of Georgia; 2. Proposal to neglect the international format of Geneva talks and settle the conflicts through a direct dialogue with Russia without the involvement of the West; 3. Conduct of targeted campaigns against NATO and US research institutions.
A journalistic investigation into Russian links of the Alliance of Patriots in the run-up to the 2020 parliamentary elections carried out by Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s investigative project, The Dossier Center, asserted, based on documents obtained from the secretariat of General Vladimir Chernov, that the Kremlin bankrolled the Patriot of Alliance and assisted it in planning the elections strategy by hiring a political scientist, Sergey Mikheyev, and a Moscow-based company POLITSECRETS to this end.
A TV company affiliated with the Alliance of Patriots is Obieqtivi TV whose editorial policy echoes foreign policy orientation of the political party. After boycotting the results of the 2020 parliamentary elections, where the Alliance of Patriots garnered only 3.14% of the votes, a decrease as compared to the result in the previous elections, the party leader, Irma Inashvili, began to host her own political talk-show in 2021. In this talk show she has tried to capitalize on the allegation that the West fights against the church and religion.
In addition to Obieqtivi TV, the Alliance of Patriots was affiliated with a number of social network accounts, some of which were deleted by Facebook in the autumn of 2020 for coordinated inauthentic behavior (CIB), including Tinp.ge -Today in politics, which was engaged in the election process and, in line with the abovementioned political party, in a campaign to discredit the NDI and the IRI.
