Orthodox Church Influence over the Election Process in Montenegro and Georgia

The paper deals with the role of the Orthodox Church in the electoral process in countries aspiring to join the European Union. The paper will analyze the case of Montenegro and Georgia and will examine the way the Orthodox Church is engaging with local election-related interlocutors during the campaign period. In 2020, the OSCE election observation mission in Georgia admitted for the very first time in its final report, that the Georgian Orthodox Church played a role during the election process, in particular in the campaigning of the ruling party, Georgian Dream. In the same year, during the parliamentary elections in Montenegro, the election observation mission concluded that the campaign environment was highly polarized over issues of the Serbian Orthodox Church and national identity and that the Church was significantly involved in the campaign. Generally, invoking religious imagery and involving the Church representatives in campaigning is a powerful tool to appeal to voters in countries where the Church holds a strong position in society. The paper aims at explaining how the ties between the religious authorities and political party representatives work and how the Church reaches and activates the voters in the chosen countries. More specifically, it will describe how the relation between the Church and political parties works during the election period both on local and national level, what kind of political parties are involved, what motivates the Church representatives to engage with political parties and in what way the Church authorities enter the political campaigns. Importantly, such informal but strong influence of the Church over the politics in Montenegro and Georgia becomes problematic when it comes to their aspirations to become members of the European Union. The majority of the European states enshrine the principle of separation between Church and State and most people, according to the polls, back church-state separation. This leads to the question whether and how Montenegro and Georgia would fit into the system of values and ideas forming one of the basic principles of politics in EU countries.