Power-sharing between kings, eristavis, princes, and aznauris evolved but remained largely the same over the centuries and continued during the medieval Kingdom of Georgia, despite attempts by several monarchs to lower the influence of the noble class.

Gagas were regularly involved in arbitrating conflicts between various families based on ancient customs and was represented in small cases by local judges, while intra-family feuds were regulated by clan elders.

A short-lived state, it brought together the Georgian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani nations under one government and one legislature, the Seim, empowered with directly negotiating with the Ottoman Empire in the last months of World War I to end hostilities on the Caucasus front.

In the early days of the invasion, a Revolutionary Committee (RevKom) was proclaimed by Georgian Bolshevik leaders which formally declared the Soviet Socialist Republic of Georgia and held both legislative and executive powers.

The international civil society organization Helsinki Watch described the new presidential powers as "sweeping", granting the President the right to veto, to declare war and martial law, to appoint the Prime Minister, the Supreme Court chairperson, the State Prosecutor, and the Commander in Chief, immunity from criminal prosecution.

Many observers believe those changes were adopted to guarantee Saakashvili's stay in power after being term limited as president,[37] although the National Movement would be defeated in the 2012 parliamentary election by Georgian Dream party.

During the session, Sergei Gavrilov, the President of the Interparliamentary Assembly, sat in the chair reserved by protocol for the Head of Parliament and gave a speech in Russian about Orthodox brotherhood of Georgia and Russia.

The protest, which worsened after an attempt to storm the parliament building and violent dispersal by special forces, led to Georgian Dream pledging electoral reform and to hold the next year's parliamentary election under a fully proportional system.

[61] That crisis came to an end on 19 April 2021, when opposition parties and Georgian Dream signed a new agreement mediated by European Council President Charles Michel guaranteeing electoral and judicial reforms in exchange for the release of Nika Melia, UNM leader who had been arrested for organizing violence during the 2019 protests.

Georgia is currently undergoing a political crisis due to the disputed legitimacy of the October 2024 Georgian parliamentary election, which was conducted with significant irregularities and described by observers as "fundamentally flawed".

Georgia's municipal election system has been irregular with constant changes as decentralization and the amount of public input in local governance have been the subject of debates in each national administration since independence.

After the 1990 legislative elections, the formerly ruling Communist Party lost its power, and in 1991, the Supreme Council of Georgia under the leadership of Zviad Gamsakhurdia banned it for allegedly supporting the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt.

Starting with the 2024 parliamentary election, the abolition of majoritarian districts will ban the electoral participation of non-partisan candidates, while those MPs that leave political parties and refuse to join a faction or group receive less office funding, less rights in Parliament, and are not entitled to travel reimbursements.

[102] At a high-level meeting between Georgian Prime Minister Zurab Zhvania and South Ossetian leader Eduard Kokoity on 5 November in Sochi, Russia, an agreement on demilitarization of the conflict zone was reached.

Despite these increasingly difficult relations, in May 2005 Georgia and Russia reached a bilateral agreement[105] by which Russian military bases (dating back to the Soviet era) in Batumi and Akhalkalaki were withdrawn.

Russia withdrew all personnel and equipment from these sites by December 2007[106] while failing to withdraw from the Gudauta base in Abkhazia, which it was required to vacate after the adoption of the Adapted Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty during the 1999 Istanbul summit.

[139] The Government of Georgia provides an annual 25 million GEL in direct funding to the Georgian Orthodox Church for as a compensation for persecution during the Soviet Union, a figure that does not include various other grants, tax benefits, and property transfers.

While the Saakashvili administration sought to push for liberal reforms until 2012, which also created an environment that allowed for public criticism of certain Church activities,[148] the Georgian Dream government has heavily relied on its ties to the Orthodox leadership.

In his sermons Ilia II has condemned homosexuality, abortion, and demanded television be censored to remove sexual content, has denounced school textbooks for insufficient patriotism, lectured against extreme liberalism and warned against pseudo-culture from abroad.

[174] After serving a year as Prime Minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who is the wealthiest man in Georgia, resigned upon the presidential election of Giorgi Margvelashvili in October 2013 and claimed to have left politics altogether.

[178] According to the 2020 Transparency International report, Bidzina Ivanishvili's influence has grown over the years (and "exponentially since 2016") despite his alleged separation from politics and that he held considerable control over the Government, law enforcement agencies, the judiciary, parliamentary institutions, and the media, while maintaining power through the use of fabricated criminal cases to sway election results, electoral fraud, persecution and blackamail of political opponents, maintaining powerful decision-makers out of public office, engaging in hostile takeover practices to control the private sector, cracking down on protests.

[181] In September 2021, a massive leak of domestic intelligence files in the State Security Service revealed a series of briefs on opposition, journalist, civil society, and diplomat activities provided by the SSS to Ivanishvili personally.

According to the Swiss outlet Tribune de Genève, Kezerashvili's trustees registered three offshore shell companies into which he moved millions of dollars two days after his resignation from the post of defence minister of Georgia.

The investigation was started in 2012 and in 2021, the Supreme Court of Georgia found that Kezerashvili was guilty of embezzling over €5 million during his time as defence minister under the auspices of a combat training project, later transferring this money abroad.

[190] Kezerashvili is considered to be a major financial donor to several Georgian opposition parties, including the United National Movement, Strategy Aghmashenebeli, European Georgia, Girchi — More Freedom and Droa.

"[209] Inheriting a centralized system of governance under the Soviet Union, Georgia's first attempts at decentralization came with the Local Self-Governance Act of 1996 that created elected assemblies at the town-level, even though most powers remained at the time in the hands of district governors ("Gambgebeli") appointed by the President.

[230] While there is no analytical consensus on the roots of polarization in Georgia, President Zourabichvili has long associated it with "part of the Georgian nature", identifying divisions as far back as the anti-Soviet dissident movement.

[231] Some have blamed the widespread use of unregulated social networks, tensions against modernization, and increasingly radical electoral choices as contributing factors to polarization, while others, including Zourabichvili, have laid accused Russia's 'soft power' that "accentuates the divide through fake news".

[232] During the 2020–2021 Georgian political crisis, the President Salome Zourabichvili announced a process to "find ways to reach a common understanding of the recent history, to help heal the wounds of the past and to move forward".

[249] Georgia has struggled with instituting a free and fair electoral environment since its independence, with major controversies and accusations of voter fraud directed at the administrations of Eduard Shevardnadze (1992–2003) and Mikheil Saakashvili (2004–2012), and the Georgian Dream government (since 2012).