IT WAS SURELY this year’s most fraught tree-lighting ceremony. Outside Georgia’s parliament building on December 14th, police squared off against thousands of protesters, as they have for the past two weeks. Inside, lawmakers from Georgian Dream, the increasingly Russia-friendly governing party, had just elected a new president in a vote with unpleasant echoes of the country’s communist past: there was only one candidate, and the tally was 224 to one. (The pro-European opposition boycotted the vote.) Now the police were tasked with clearing the street for the mayor of Tbilisi to preside over the illumination of the capital’s Christmas tree, meant to show that the government had the situation under control.