GEORGIA has been known for excess and eccentricity since ancient times, when it was called Colchis, the home of Medea and the Golden Fleece in Greek mythology. But even by Georgian standards, the latest hobby of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest and most powerful man, is extravagant. The reclusive oligarch, whose hilltop glass-and-steel castle towers over Tbilisi, the capital, buys the oldest and tallest trees in the country, digs them out and transports them by road and ship to his residence on the Black Sea.

Most Georgians are amused, and hope he will buy one of theirs. But the image of a 100-year-old, 650-tonne tulip tree sailing over the water is an apt symbol for Mr Ivanishvili’s role in Georgia. The billionaire, who holds no official post but pulls strings from behind the scenes, is changing not only its physical but its political landscape. He has also uprooted the largest figure in Georgian public life, former president Mikheil Saakashvili.

After taking power in a popular uprising in 2003, Mr Saakashvili forcefully modernised Georgia, broke with its Soviet legacy and built an effective state. In 2010 his United National Movement (UNM) lost an election to the Georgian Dream party, an alliance put together by Mr Ivanishvili, whose accumulated wealth (mostly made in Russia) was half as large as Georgia’s annual GDP. Mr Saakashvili was forced out of the country; some of his associates were put in jail. Yet the main reason the UNM lost power was not its reforms or anti-corruption efforts, but fear of its repressive use of the judiciary for political ends.

In some ways Georgia today is freer than under Mr Saakashvili. The number of court acquittals has risen, and the fear of persecution is gone. But Georgia has also lost its sense of mission, says Gia Khukhashvili, a political consultant once close to Mr Ivanishvili. Economic growth hovers around 3%, far short of the double-digit levels it saw under Mr Saakashvili. Georgia as a brand has lost its shine. Once a model of modernisation and one of the rare post-Soviet countries to have been successful at graft-busting, it now exemplifies the difficulty of transition. Critics say Mr Ivanishvili treats it as his playground. Oligarchs in other post-Soviet countries are envious. To be sure, the changes brought in by the Rose Revolution in 2003 have not been fully reversed. Corruption has not returned; Georgia rates better than Italy and close to Spain on Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index. It has a strong civil society. Indeed, many of Mr Saakashvili’s former allies, including Giga Bokeria, the brain behind the country’s reforms, think the country has outgrown its former leader. They say it was the fear of Mr Saakashvili regaining power that cost the UNM last year’s parliamentary elections. (They are also angry at him for endorsing riots in Batumi in March.) After that election, much of the UNM’s leadership quit. In May they unveiled a new party, the Movement for Liberty-European Georgia, at a rally in Tbilisi’s largest stadium. Waving flags of Georgia and the European Union, they pledged to eschew violence and hatred. “We will replace Ivanishvili without destroying our country,” said Gigi Ugulava, the leader of the party. Elena Khoshtaria, the female face of the party and a candidate for mayor of Tbilisi, talked about poverty and greenery. The split in the UNM may be tactically beneficial to Mr Ivanishvili, but it deprives him of a politically convenient arch-enemy: destroying Mr Saakashvili’s party was Georgian Dream’s raison d’etre. It also sharpens the country’s ideological conflict between modernisation and nostalgia. On June 18th the patriarch of the Orthodox church, a powerful figure, called for restoring Georgia’s monarchy. A few years ago this notion would have been scorned by the young, westernised elite. Now it is backed by one of that elite’s representatives, Irakly Kobalkhidze, the speaker of parliament and the secretary of Georgian Dream. “We must take into account all factors, including our local peculiarities,” he said.

Some believe this is an attempt to undermine the president, Giorgi Margvelashvili, who has clashed with Mr Ivanishvili. Although the president has had no executive power since 2010, he is elected by direct popular vote (something that Georgian Dream wants to change) and is viewed as an independent arbiter.

With its support declining, Georgian Dream has been trying to change the constitution. It has proposed banning parties from forming electoral alliances (despite coming to power in an alliance seven years ago), imposing a 5% threshold to enter parliament, and giving all unallocated votes to whichever party comes first. Given the fragmented political landscape, this could give Georgian Dream another 20-30% of the seats.

On June 19th the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission ruled that this combination of changes would “lead to a serious infringement of the principle of equality”. A few days later, an emergency session of parliament approved a slightly amended version of the constitution that ignores the protests of the president, other political parties and civic activists. Georgian Dream also postponed until 2024 a planned shift from the current electoral system, whose combination of majoritarian and proportional voting benefits the government, to a fully proportional one, and barred the sale of agricultural land to foreigners.

Meanwhile, public life is starting to feel less free. An independent Azerbaijani journalist living in Georgia was kidnapped in Tbilisi in May and passed on to Azerbaijani authorities. An attempt by Mr Ivanishvili’s allies to take control over Rustavi-2, an opposition television channel, was stopped only by a decision of the European Court of Human Rights.

One closely-watched case is that of Lasha Tordia, the head of the state audit office, who says he was assaulted at a nightclub by Otar Partskhaladze, a former chief prosecutor. Mr Partskhaladze and his bodyguards allegedly beat Mr Tordia after an argument about his agency’s investigation into a land deal. Mr Khukhashvili says that if the alleged assault goes unpunished, “it shows that Georgia is slipping back to a system where informal power trumps state institutions.”

Another test of Georgia’s future will be the mayoral election in Tbilisi in October. The field includes a former footballer for Milan (running with Georgian Dream), a popular TV presenter (running with the UNM) and an outsider who models himself on Emmanuel Macron, the French president. The contest will be a bellwether for the parliamentary vote in 2020. In today’s Georgian politics, winning Tbilisi is the metaphorical equivalent of finding the Golden Fleece.