Thousands of Georgians rallied in central Tbilisi on Monday night and heard opposition leaders vow to continue protests until results from last week’s parliamentary election are annulled and the ruling Georgian Dream party is ousted.
Georgian Dream’s critics say its official 54 per cent tally in the ballot was a sham and warn that the strategic Black Sea state is veering towards autocracy and Russia and off the path leading to eventual European Union membership.
Georgian Dream insists the ballot was clean and that it wants to join the EU, but Brussels has halted its accession process after the government passed laws tightening control over civil society and the LGBT+ community. The party also peddled anti-western conspiracy theories during the election campaign, while portraying its push to improve ties with Moscow as an attempt to preserve peace.
[ ‘Blatant fraud’: Georgia’s opposition calls for protests over election resultOpens in new window ]
As several thousand people waved Georgian and EU flags outside Georgia’s parliament, opposition leaders said their parties would not take up their mandates, but would continue gathering and publicising evidence of election fraud while lobbying for western support and holding rallies in Tbilisi and other cities.
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“The protest will be permanent… Our goal is to celebrate the victory won by the people, to conduct new elections,” said Giorgi Vashadze, a leader of the opposition Unity-National Movement alliance. “It is important to start a new type of protest, which will unite the whole of Georgia, and finally remove Georgian Dream from government.”
[ Daniel McLaughlin: Georgia's 'fear zones'Opens in new window ]
Tina Bokuchava, another leader of the same group, said billionaire Georgian Dream founder Bidzina Ivanishvili “not only stole the right to elections, the European future, not only conducted a Russian special operation, but also believed that the Georgian people would accept this theft”.
“Our children will definitely grow up in European Georgia, we will do everything to achieve this,” she pledged to the crowd. “This unites us today, and with this truth, with this perseverance, with this struggle, we will definitely win.”
Former Georgian president Giorgi Margvelashvili, now a leader of the Strong Georgia bloc, compared the challenge facing the opposition to his country’s emergence from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991.
“The protest will bring results, but we must understand that the protest will be long, exhausting, with its victories and failures,” he said. “This is a very long road that we have to go through and we have already gone through it once when we created an independent Georgia from Soviet Georgia.”
In the crowd, protester Lika Gonikishvili said she had never felt like “the enemy was so close”.
“Our government is my enemy now but I know we can change it. I am worried about the situation but not scared, because this is my country and my town. It’s impossible that Georgia will become Russia or similar to Russia,” she added.
Nino Goginashvili, a member of the opposition Akhali party, said “It’s very clear for us now that Georgia is on the edge of dictatorship, and we are not going to give up on our democracy and our future.”
“Georgians are European, our mindset is European. Our main goal is freedom and independence and we are not going to stay in the shadow of Russia anymore,” she added. “Everything can be changed with the power of the people, the power of legitimate protest and with the help of our European friends.”
Demonstrator Sofia Japaridze said “The protests must be permanent to finish [Georgian Dream] off… otherwise they’ll be in power for 30 years.”
Alongside her in the crowd, Roland Kalandadze said he believed Georgian Dream could be beaten if “the opposition stands with the people and they have a plan – and they take action with this plan”.
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