Off-side: Georgians reject new president

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The Economist.

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from THE Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

There's no denying America's space agency NASA doesn't seem to get good value out of taxpayers money. It's an obvious target for an incoming administration that wants to cut waste. Yet budget slashers such as Elon Musk.

May struggle and the martini is at once a simple drink and an endlessly variable one. We head to an infamous London martini emporium to discuss a new book that asks how it got and stayed so popular.

But first, This weekend, Georgia's capital, Tbilisi, was a scene of contrast inside the parliament. The ruling Georgian Dream Party elected a new president. It was a procedural show that harked back to the country's Soviet past. There was only one name on the ballot, Mikhail Kavalashvili, a former footballer for Manchester City. But the people of Georgia aren't happy that Moscow is once again pulling the strings. During the vote, thousands took to the streets outside Parliament. It's the third week of protests against the Georgian Dream government after a disputed election this autumn. Demonstrations erupted in late November when the government voted to delay the country's accession to the eu. But as this weekend's event showed, dissent is now about something far larger.

These protests have long passed the point of them being simply about that EU promise. They are now more about creating a country that Georgians actually want to live in.

Sara Lanyuk, our senior producer, has been reporting from Tbilisi this weekend.

On the streets, it really looked like there was a potential boiling point in this conflict between the people and their government. And it was somehow diffused. But it really highlighted just how delicate that line is that the Georgian Dream government is walking right now between trying to suppress dissent and being so heavy handed that they in fact incite a revolution.

We spoke on the show a few weeks ago when demonstrations were starting to boil up. Why would this weekend have been such a tense moment.

So for the last 19 days, these protests have been incredibly dynamic and it's become a bit of a chess match. In that first week when we first visited the story, it seemed like it would be a violent revolt. The riot police were deployed right away and they brought out the tear gas, the water cannon, and protesters retaliated with fireworks being launched not only at police, but at parliament. And then things actually managed to escalate further beyond that point. After we talked about this story, police started peeling off protesters from the crowd at random and beating them in the streets. Many of these people ended up in hospital with pretty severe injuries. And last weekend, as I attended the rallies, you actually saw it escalate even further still because you saw these unmarked, masked thugs just prowling through back streets and alleys and they were randomly attacking people on their way to or from the protests. And one of those attacks was actually of a local journalist and it was caught live on tv. Opposition members have also been pulled out of their offices and left bloodied and bruised. The Georgian Dream Party that is in power now, they have denied involvement with those unmarked thugs, but it's a tactic that has been used by this regime before, was in fact used in Ukraine during the Euromaidan protests by the Russian backed government there in 2014. It is something straight from the Kremlin playbook, but that in fact just spurred more people to come out and that's what really scared the Georgian Dream Party.

It seems astonishing that even with that level of violence, people would still be coming out onto the streets.

It was a really impressive show of defiance from the Georgian people. I'll be honest. The night after the most violent protests, I saw 13 year old girl in the street and she was holding this big sign above her head that said eu. When was the last time someone fought like this for you? And I asked her, have you seen the violence? Are you afraid? Only stupid people are frightened by this.

And ones who care for our country are encouraged. So yeah.

And so the government saw this scene of more and more people pouring into the streets and they actually changed their tactic entirely this last week on the streets at these protests. It's been eerily calm, actually. Law enforcement has completely stepped back. They are still there, but they are in their vans and buses, idling blocks away and they let people just kind of disperse on their own in the early morning hours. And now they've turned to a completely different kind of intimidation where they're issuing summons to high profile community members, arresting some of them, charging them with civil infractions. One man this week was actually, he's a researcher at a pro democracy ngo, and he was taken off the street while walking his dog. And when his friends went to go and try and figure out where he was, they just found his dog tied to a tree. And so by Saturday, when the presidential election was taking place, there was also meant to be this ceremonial tree lighting hosted by the Tbilisi mayor, and he is in alignment with the Georgian Dream Party. And so it was expected to be this showdown it really all built to this weekend.

So what actually happened this weekend, people.

Were out all day on Saturday and it actually had become rather hazardous because so many of the protesters, in order to mock the election of this new president, who is a former footballer himself, they all brought footballs and they were playing in the streets and you had to dodge footballs left, right and center. But it was around 6:30 that the enormous police presence descended on Rustavelli Avenue. Hundreds of regularly dressed police officers, these weren't riot cops, but hundreds of them streamed into the street right before that. Ceremonial tree lighting was supposed to take place at seven. And they just stood there. And at one point, in a really poor strategic move, they ended up sandwiched between two crowds of protesters. And that really scared me because the most dangerous thing in these situations is in fact, scared police officers, because you don't know what will happen next. And then around 7 o', clock, they just left. The government had decided that this wasn't going to be their moment. They weren't going to pursue this tree lighting, they delayed it, and they are, in fact, walking that line of when do we pick our battles?

Sarah, as you say, protest originally erupted because the Georgia Dream Party pulled out of EU accession plans. But now, of course, it seems to be about far more than that. What are people really demonstrating about?

So, yeah, it's about the European Union, but anyone I've spoken to has said it's really not about the European Union at all. They know it would be a long process to join the eu. It's more about the fact that the Georgian people have been put between Russia and the West. And it comes down to a matter of values. Since independence here in Georgia, civil society has really developed and they're not willing to give up on democracy and they're not willing to give up on the economic opportunities of being aligned with the West. The issue really comes down to the fact that the real power broker in Georgia is a man named Bidzina Ivanishvili, who was the founder of the Georgian Dream party in 2012. And he made his money in Russia in the 1990s. And while he might have always been aligned with Russia, it's increasingly obvious that the government he controls is moving more and more towards Russia. And the people are saying no. This year of backsliding, it ends now. And they're angry.

Sarah, you mentioned the word revolution earlier. Obviously, the government is trying to do everything it can to get this under control. Will it succeed?

The task now is definitely harder than it's been at any other point. There have been three rounds of mass protests in the country this year alone, and they've all fizzled out. This round could be different. And there's two reasons why they are likely to be different. One is that the dissent has completely spread to the regions. Any city, any town is having regular protests now. And I went to a small town called Kashouri in central Georgia, and I met the people there. It was a very modest gathering in the city center. It was about two dozen people, very wholesome. They were brought tea by a nearby coffee shop, and people there said, it doesn't matter how many people are here, it's that we've never protested here before. And one woman, an English teacher named Lana Achilashvili, told me that because so many people rely on public service jobs in that town, they couldn't afford to stay. But that there was anyone in the street was still consequential.

When we started protesting, we were more than 2000, but in two days the number decreased. I don't know why, but there are rumors that people have been threatened. And because of that, they fear to stand here with us because they are afraid that they may lose jobs.

Are you not afraid?

I'm not afraid, no.

The second reason these protests are different is that even back in the capital, the. The protests are dynamic and evolving. Where it started as evening protests every night, now it's splintered. And Thursday it sector workers shut down the city in its entirety, blocking traffic everywhere. And they've been met by any number of other professions, doctors, teachers. And then, not to be outdone by the vocations, hobbyists have taken to the street too. And so on Friday, we saw nightclub enthusiasts take to the street. And on Saturday, I walked through the streets with the mountaineers and hikers. So someone described it to me as a many headed monster. And the powers that be don't know which head to chase anymore.

So what happens next?

That's a really good question, and I think there's a couple problems here. The demonstrations so far have lacked a charismatic leader or a clear moment of focus. And the government is going to hope to play on that, especially coming into the holidays. They hope that these protests die out the way the past ones have. But there could be another flashpoint coming here on December 29. The outgoing President, Salome Zurobicvili. She is firmly pro European Union and she has chosen to stand with the people. She said she refuses to step down. She is the last institution that isn't corrupt in this country. And so we don't know what that will look like come December 29th. But really, this puts that oligarch Ivanishvili between a rock and a hard place here because as one local reporter here put it to me, Ivanishvili knows what happens to the people who betray the Kremlin. And that's what the Georgian people are really up against here. It's not just them against the government. It's them against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is not inclined to let Georgia go quietly.

Sarah, great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Rosie.

There was a time that America's space agency, NASA, was really more an aspect of cold war great power competition than about exploration for its own sake. Another spectacular year in the space race. The Soviets on October 12, Columbus Day, launched an innovation in space travel, the three man space bus that cannot lose mission led of course, to the most watched flag planting the world has ever known. Man on the moon.

We copy you down, Eagle.

Back then, these were government projects and no price was too high for national pride. These days, private companies are doing more and more of the grunt work and they're doing it in many cases far, far more cheaply, something the incoming Trump administration knows all too well.

With all the excitement around the new Department of Government Efficiency, or doge, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, people have been trying to work out what its cost cutting targets might be.

Tim Cross is our senior science writer.

I think one that is almost certainly in the crosshairs is not NASA.

So why do you think NASA would be the target of this government efficiency effort anyway?

It's hard to think maybe of a more visible example of potentially wasteful government spending than the Artemis program, a vast project to rerun the 1960s with the goal of landing humans back on the moon, where, of course, America first went in 1969. It involves this big rocket called the Space Launch System, the sls, a crew capsule, a somewhat pointless looking space station that orbits around the moon. And so far it's spent about $93 billion and not flown a single astronaut at all.

So if we are speaking just about Artemis, then that should be axed or slimmed down or just simply made more efficient by the Doge folk.

I think you could make a case for all three of those. There are lots of places where you can point to wasteful spending and lots of places where you say, you know, maybe this could be cut immediately. So if you start with the rocket itself, the SLS is essentially built from upcycled space shuttle parts. You know, the reason it's orange is that the central bit is a stretched version of the Space Shuttle's fuel tank. It uses the same solid rocket boosters that strapped to the side that powered the Space shuttle, and it even uses the same engines on the bottom. And the idea of this, back in the day the SLS was first designed was, well, we've built these things before. We know how to do it. This should save money. And I think it's pretty safe to say at this point that whatever else it's done, it hasn't saved money. And if you look at a report from NASA's own inspector general, they reckon that the first four flights of the SLS will cost around $4.1 billion each. Rockets are expensive, but they don't have to be that expensive. It's something on the order of maybe 20 times the launch price of one of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets. Back in 2019, Jim Bridenstine, who was then running NASA, ended up almost being fired after he said, well, hang on a second, maybe we should look at using Falcon Heavy instead of sls, because we could probably then get to the moon more quickly.

There is another solution out there, a Falcon Heavy that ultimately has the ability.

To put us to potentially.

Gosh, Gerst is going to be so.

Mad at me for saying all this.

There is nothing sacred here that is off the table that could help us land boots on the moon in 2024.

And then, if the media reports are to be believed, after that, he was given a pretty serious dressing down in private by a guy called Richard Shel, who was then one of the senators for Alabama. And when Bridenstine next appeared in public, he was very much toeing the line that, no, no, no, we have to stick with the sls.

We have looked at options and we have determined that the the only option where we are going to be able to put humans on the surface of.

The moon in 2024, which is my.

Mandate, is to utilize the SLS.

And this, I think, is an example of why. Although on paper, Artemis looks Like a turkey. Actually cutting it in practice is going to be quite difficult because it conflicts with a lot of vested interests at.

The state level, presumably in the state of Alabama, if Mr. Shelby was so exorcised by that quote.

Well, Alabama is the state that hosts the Marshall Space Flight Centre, which is the bit of NASA that's in charge of the sls. To understand this, you have to look back to when NASA was founded and what they did then was spread the sort of expertise, they spread the organisation across several different American states. And politically this was then perhaps quite a canny move because you had all these high tech, well paid engineering jobs dotted all around the country and no senator wants to see those kind of jobs leave his or her home state. So by doing that, you sort of ended up giving NASA a phalanx of congressional bodyguards who would make sure that the funding wouldn't be cut too much. These days, though, I think the feeling is very much that it's the bodyguards who paradoxically are in charge of this thing now. And in fact, that's why one of the SLS nicknames is the Senate Launch System, because this whole thing is being driven more by Congress than it is by NASA itself.

So there's a whole new frontier of conflict then when Mr. Musk and company come in trying to slash things.

Yeah. So if you look at the person who Donald Trump has suggested be the new NASA boss, Jared Isaacman, he has paid SpaceX for two missions into space out of his own pocket. He seems quite keen on the idea that Artemis should have its wings fairly heavily clipped. But the problem, as you said, is that the man who's pushing all this behind the scenes, we think, is Elon Musk. And of course he owns SpaceX. And if NASA does ditch the SLS or pareback Artemis in other ways, then the only organization in America that could still get American astronauts to the moon is going to be SpaceX. So I think no matter how good the case looks on paper, it's going to be almost impossible for Musk to avoid allegations of self dealing and people saying, oh well, he's only doing this because he wants to send the money SpaceX's way.

Right. But we've talked a lot on the show about the push for private space and it seems to be going very well and comparatively efficiently. These are just the hiccups on the way to an eventual decline of NASA, is it not?

There definitely is a big and thriving private space industry and there are companies doing everything from sending scientific probes to the moon to out there, stuff like asteroid mining and zero gravity manufacturing, or at least they're aspiring to do these things. I think the problem is though, there's only one private company that has the capability to do Artemis instead of NASA, and that's SpaceX. I think that's just going to give even more ammunition to the people in Congress who would still like to keep those SLS jobs, would still like to keep them in their homes, states, and will probably do their best to frustrate any effort at killing it.

Tim, thanks very much for your time.

Thanks, Jason.

I have been taken to Duke's Bar in St. James's a swish part of London, a place that is absolutely famous for martinis, which I'm sure you know makes me very happy indeed. First of all, Maria Vilczek, our news editor, has brought me here. Thank you. As an, as an opening gambit.

Thanks.

Why are we here?

Well, Duke's Bar, hidden away in a side street here, but already with a queue of 20 people outside waiting to try one of these iconic martinis, is probably the place to have one of these drinks in London.

Okay. And for the uninitiated, God help them, what's in a martini?

So a martini is a cocktail that is made with chilled gin or vodka with some vermouth. There's no strict recipe for it. In general, it's something that is short, strong and made with light spirits. But there have been endless rifts on it for more than a century.

And I know that the history is a really messy thing. So let's not talk about the, the fraught history and where it came from and where the first one was. But tell me some stuff we do know for sure about them.

So we know that the martini is an American invention. It came about around the end of the 19th century century as an apparatus when vermouth made its way to America, it became very fashionable to have sweet drinks before dinner made with it. Then around the turn of the century, as distillation became better, people started ordering more and more dry martinis. It became a macho drink, extolled by many writers like Hemingway, who enjoyed more parts gin than vermouth. Then around the 1980s, the pendulum swung back the other way and fruity, frothy, colorful martinis became very fashionable. Fruit punches, espresso, all of these new things were mixed into the drink until we've arrived back at the classic.

Today, our martini are very simple. It's about the quality of the ingredients, the temperature of the glass. What's the most popular one? The most popular There are actually three. Is the gin or the vodka or the Vesper? I would like a Vesper. I suppose the question is, in all of that rich history, there's a bunch of drinks. Why is the martini dewy thing such an enduring one?

So a new book by Alice Lassell, who's a reporter at the Financial Times, has just recently come out. It's called the Martini. And she argues that the enduring appeal of the drink is down to it being resilient and adaptable. It survived for over a century precisely because it is easy to make at home. So during the Prohibition, for example, when cocktail bars were closed down, people were able to continue making the drink, which really just needs two ingredients. But also there are endless variations that you can have on the classic recipe which allows you to personalize, it allows bartenders to show off their skills, all the while retaining the sophistication of quite a simple drink and the elegance of that, but also something mischievous. When you order a Martini at the start of the night, you immediately know that it's going to be more interesting than had you gone for a glass of wine or a more elaborate colorful cocktail.

Which is to say we're set up for a good night here already in the Vespa. So like I said now I put a couple of drop of Angostura bitter.

Just to give a little bit of.

Color and the bitterness, that's the vermouth. Amber is 21 point ABV, which is quite higher for vermouth. Then I'm gonna have the vodka polish rye vodka, one part and then the three parts it will be number three gin. And then instead of a lemon, I use an orange and you will see the magic, you see the oil come out.

Have you had any interesting martinis?

I mean, I think the one that sticks in a lot of people's memory is the espresso martini, which is pretty far removed. Right? It does not seem very Martini esque. I suppose I'd argue that lots of things are called martinis that aren't. It's sort of sucking some of the martini cool for some new obscure events.

Well, that's true at this point. They come in different shapes and sizes and colors. There's one at a never famous bar, a more modern one called Taya elementary in London, where they will serve you the iconic green olive but stuffed with blue cheese in a tiny vodka glass. A kind of bite sized Martini that has some of the DNA of the original, but is, as you say, quite far removed.

I suppose another question is why the drink is still so popular as a famously sort of strong, serious drinkers drink when what we hear is that people are tending to drink less. In particular the young.

That's true. Especially young people are indeed drinking less, but they're drinking better. So people are turning away from many cheap drinks and towards quality cocktails, often ones that they can make at home. And with the martini, you can endlessly riff on the basic recipe. A study by two mixologists identified that just by looking at 21 variables, that leads you to almost 7 quadrillion possible combinations of a drink. And as personalization and expressing yourself in various ways is becoming more popular in fashion, in food, the Martini is the perfect canvas to express yourself with.

Well, Maria, thank you very much for that. I think it's probably time that we give these things a try.

Let's. Well, cheers. Smells amazing. It tastes sweet and slightly bitter from the orange peel. You can't feel the alcohol that much. Considering that this is five shots of neat booze.

I feel the alcohol. It is definitely a no nonsense, boozy drink.

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