Read Our Monthly Magazine
And support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system
Georgia’s Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has said that senior EU officials may be planning to kill him. “Look at what happened to [Slovakian PM Robert] Fico, you should be very careful,” he claims to have been told on a call with the European Commission. Olivér Várhelyi, who was on the call, has said the remarks were completely misinterpreted.
However outlandish, Kobakhidze’s comments on Thursday had been pre-emptively and comfortably topped by statements from Mariam Lashkhi, another ruling Georgian Dream party MP, who last Sunday suggested that “freemasons” were behind shadowy schemes across the world. “We were seeing they do have the influence on global politics,” she told The News Agents podcast.
She made the claim in defence of Georgia’s controversial ‘foreign agents’ law which has ignited weeks of violent protests, and after being asked to explain comments made by Bidzina Ivanishvili, Chair of the Georgian Dream party.
Ivanishvili had earlier claimed that a “global war party” was responsible for creating discord across the world and dragging countries into conflicts with Moscow. “It is this global force that first forced the confrontation of Georgia with Russia and then put Ukraine in even worse peril,” he said at a rally last month, accusing “NGOs and the radical opposition” of doing their bidding, Politico reported.
These conspiratorial allegations are symptoms of a rapidly accelerating political crisis that, having gripped the South Caucasian country for more than two months, is now barrelling toward its climactic moment.
On Tuesday, Georgian law-makers will gather to cast a final vote on a Russian-style law on ‘foreign influence’. Critics have compared the bill’s provisions, which effectively ban NGOs and independent media from operating in the country if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad, to methods used by the Putin regime to crush dissent since the war in Ukraine.
The bill passed its third and final reading earlier this month before being vetoed by Georgia’s President, Salome Zurabishvili. However, Georgia’s Parliament in Tbilisi has now begun the process of overriding that decision.
Cracks in the Crackdown? Pressure Mounts on Georgian Dream
Amid massive public protests and deepening international pressure, the ruling Georgian Dream party has said it may be willing to negotiate on their controversial ‘Russian law’
Despite the law’s future remaining uncertain, its effects are already being felt by its intended targets, with violent crackdowns in Tbilisi that have resulted in dozens of people being hospitalised, hundreds harassed, and some even forced to flee the country.
While Georgian Dream had initially appeared willing to negotiate on its draft law, following its wholesale rejection by pro-European president Zurabishvili, Government MPs are now all but certain to grit their teeth against a growing threat of Western sanctions to pass the bill.
In the process, they will torch the hopes of around 90% of the Georgian voting public of one day joining the EU, as well as inching the country closer to Moscow, which has occupied more than a fifth of Georgian territory since the early 1990s.
“The Prime Minister and his party continue to burn bridges with the European Union while promoting dubious conspiracy theories at every turn,” Tina Bokuchava, parliamentary leader of United National Movement, Georgia’s largest opposition party, told Byline Times. “If Georgia is to enjoy a prosperous future, then it needs to engage with its international partners and not retreat to a position of isolationism.”
Many outside observers have commented on what appear to be parallels between the growing unrest in Tbilisi and Ukraine’s 2013 Maidan Uprising, which saw the ousting of then President Viktor Yanukovych’s Government. The latter also served as a prelude to Russia’s annexation of Crimea the following year – begging the question: what happens if Georgian Dream falls?
A research analyst with first-hand knowledge of the situation in Georgia, who was also a participant in the Maidan Uprising, told Byline Times that, despite comparisons, the two situations “in reality… could not be more different”.