Facing condemnation of the United States Defying his own president, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze on Sunday praised police for cracking down on protesters who he said were acting on foreign orders to undermine the state.
Georgia, a country of 3.7 million that was once part of the Soviet Union, has been plunged into crisis since the ruling Georgian Dream party said Thursday it was suspending accession negotiations with the European Union for the next four years.
The EU and the United States is alarmed by what it sees as Georgia’s shift from the pro-Western path into the Russian sphere of influence. Large anti-government protests have taken place in the capital Tbilisi over the past three nights, with police firing water cannon and tear gas into the crowds.
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Georgian Prime Minister Kobakhidze attends a press conference in Tbilisi, Georgia on November 28, 2024 (Irakli Gedenidze)
More protests are planned for Sunday evening in Tbilisi, with local media reporting demonstrations taking place in towns and cities across the country.
Russian security official Dmitry Medvedev said on Sunday that an attempted revolution is taking place in Georgia. The former Russian president said on Telegram that Georgia was “moving rapidly on the Ukrainian path, into the dark abyss. Usually these kinds of things end very badly.”
Medvedev, once seen as a modernizing reformer, has reinvented himself as an aggressive hawk since Ukraine’s massive invasion of Ukraine, often hurling dire warnings at Kiev and its Western supporters.
The Kremlin has not yet commented on the latest events in Georgia, but it has long accused the West of fomenting revolutions in post-Soviet countries that Moscow still considers part of its sphere of influence.
‘Foreign instructors’
Georgian Prime Minister Kobakhidze rejected criticism from the United States, which has condemned the use of “excessive force” against protesters.
“Despite the heaviest systematic violence applied yesterday by the violent groups and their foreign instructors, the police acted at a higher level than the American and European ones and successfully protected the state from a new attempt to violate the constitutional order,” he told a news conference. , without providing evidence of foreign involvement.
Kobakhidze on Saturday also shrugged off Washington’s announcement that it would suspend its strategic partnership with Georgia. He said this was a “temporary event” and that Georgia would talk to the new government President-elect Donald Trump upon taking office in January.
Deepening the country’s constitutional crisis even further, outgoing President Salome Zourabichvili – a critic of the government and a strong supporter of Georgia’s EU membership – said on Saturday that she would refuse to resign if her term ends later this year. month ends.
Zourabichvili said she would remain in office because the new parliament – which was elected in October in elections that the opposition said were rigged – was illegitimate and did not have the power to appoint her successor.
Kobakhidze said he understood Zourabichvili’s “emotional state”.
“But on December 29, she will obviously have to leave her residence and hand over this building to a legitimately elected president,” he said.
Georgian Dream has nominated Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former football star with a track record of harsh, anti-Western statements, as its candidate for president. The head of state will be elected on December 14 by an electoral college consisting of parliamentarians and representatives of the local government.
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‘Foreign agents’
For much of the period since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Georgia has leaned heavily toward the West and sought to reduce the influence of Russia, to which the country lost a brief war in 2008. It has been promised that eventually Membership of NATOand became an official candidate for accession to the EU last year.
But domestic opponents and Western governments are alarmed by what they see as the Georgian Dream government’s increasingly authoritarian and pro-Russian tendencies.
In June, a law was passed requiring NGOs to register as ‘foreign agents’ if they receive more than 20% of their funding from abroad. In September, parliament passed a law restricting LGBT rights.
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The government says it is acting to protect the country from foreign interference and prevent Ukraine’s fate from being dragged into another war. with Russia.
The EU’s new foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, expressed solidarity with the protesters on Sunday.
“We stand with the Georgian people and their choice for a European future,” she wrote on X.
“We condemn the violence against demonstrators and deplore the ruling party’s signals not to follow Georgia’s path to the EU, and the country’s democratic backsliding. This will have direct consequences on the EU side.”
