Young Georgians fight for their right to party

BACHO CHALADZE, a DJ, had just settled into his set at Cafe Gallery, a nightclub in Tbilisi, when a group of unwelcome guests burst through the door. “They rushed in with rifles and masks,” he recalls. “They ran to me to turn off the music”—at that moment, a bass-heavy track by Fumiya Tanaka, a Japanese producer. Nearby at Bassiani, a cavernous club in the bowels of a football stadium, a similar scene unfolded as armed Georgian police stormed in, pushing patrons against the walls and the floor. As Kate Beard, a photographer visiting from London, puts it: “The vibe got very dead very quickly.”

The government said the raids on May 12th targeted drug dealers, in response to at least five recent drug-related deaths. Yet the standoff, Mr Chaladze says, is about something bigger: a struggle between Georgian traditionalists and a growing movement of social liberals in Tbilisi. (Both tendencies are represented inside the ruling party, Georgian Dream.) A new, Westernised generation “want to express themselves not only by dancing, but through different lifestyles,” says Ghia Nodia, a professor of politics at Ilia State University in Tbilisi. “It’s not a teenage rebellion stage—they are beyond that.”