The United States isn’t the only country facing terrible options in its elections this fall. Georgia, in the Caucasus region south of Russia, is again looking at the usual lineup of right-wing parties to choose between — something typical of its politics in recent years. But there are also dozens of new vanity-project parties that have formed in order to take advantage of the low barrier to get into parliament — and hence access state funding.

The low barrier was itself a victory won by the opposition, after protests last summer prompted by an MP for European Georgia (a splinter from former president Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement). He rushed into the parliamentary auditorium draped in the Georgian flag and threw Russian MP Sergei Gavrilov out of the chamber. If Gavrilov was chairing a routine meeting — a barely political event connected to the Orthodox Church — the optics couldn’t have been worse for the dominant Russophobic mood: a Russian politician sat in the most powerful seat in the Georgian parliament, and so he had to be chased out.

Such histrionics have been the norm in Georgian politics over the last three decades — a blend of farce and tragedy perfectly symbolized by Saakashvili himself. After his election defeat in late 2012, he was ousted as president by the then-new Georgian Dream coalition, bankrolled by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. Forced to flee the country, Saakashvili curiously pursued his political career abroad — becoming a Ukrainian citizen and governor of that country’s Odessa oblast. His time as governor was short-lived, as he turned on Petro Poroshenko — the president who appointed him in the first place — with accusations of corruption. Ukraine’s new leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, has since appointed Saakashvili to chair the executive committee of its National Reforms Council. But in recent weeks, the well-traveled Saakashvili has announced his return to Georgian politics.