On the freezing streets of Tbilisi every night now crowds of thousands are confronting water cannons and enduring police beatings. And protests have spread across Georgia. Opposition leaders have been arrested, while their MPs are refusing to take their seats in parliament in the wake of internationally repudiated, rigged, elections in October.
Only a month ago fellow EU accession candidate Moldova successfully pushed back a proxy Russian campaign to undermine its election. In Romania, the first round of the presidential election is to be re-run, following what appear well-founded allegations of a Moscow-inspired social media campaign in favour of one candidate.
In Georgia the Putin proxy is the Georgian Dream party, founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. It has seized the opportunity of election victory for its candidate, prime minister Irakli Kobakhidze, to complain of Brussels “blackmail” and attempts to “organise a revolution in the country”. It has announced the suspension of EU accession talks until 2028 and will not accept any EU funds until then either.
The move, with its echoes of the suspension a decade ago by its then-Russian-leaning president of Ukraine’s own EU association agreement, has provoked uproar in Georgia, where some 85 per cent aspire to EU membership which is enshrined in the constitution. Ironically, the accession process has already been partly stalled by Brussels in response to Georgian Dream’s enactment of repressive anti-NGO legislation modelled on Russian measures. In July the government also passed sweeping anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. The EU has made clear the legislation is incompatible with EU values.
The union must immediately introduce travel sanctions against those associated with the crackdown, and back opposition and directly elected president Salome Zourabichvili’s calls for the release of imprisoned demonstrators and for a new election. Like support for Ukraine, the struggle against the extension of Putin’s soft power attacks on the EU and its allies is vitally important.