Headline : A trailblazer on the wrong track

Read more from the original article on here at www.ips-journal.eu.

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No. of Paragraph 13

It is actually not that long ago that the story of Georgia's recent history seemed to have a happy ending: The young democracy in the South Caucasus was one of the first Eastern European countries to sign an association agreement with the EU in 2014 and since then has consistently been seen as a pioneer and role model in its neighbourhood for reforms and good governance. However, this appearance has long since faded.

Although the EU granted Georgia the long-awaited EU accession candidate status at the end of 2023, it ultimately acted primarily out of geopolitical considerations rather than on the basis of real progress, as Georgia had in fact only fulfilled two and a half of the 12 EU conditions that should have been fulfilled to achieve candidate status. For this reason, being granted candidate status was also a vote of confidence in Georgia's population. In hardly any other country is the level of support for EU accession as high as in Georgia; young people in particular see their country's future in Europe, and the desire to join the EU is even written into the Georgian constitution.

The Georgian leadership under the national conservative ‘Georgian Dream’ party, whose founder and honorary chairman is the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, had been basking in the glory of the candidate status, being the party that was driving forward all the decisive reform steps on the path to accession since 2012. The party has certainly raised expectations during its long time in government that it is now unable to realise: Anyone who really wants to join the EU must also tackle the really tough nuts and bolts, keyword judicial reform and deoligarchisation, and thus shake up their own power base. The party leader Gharibashvili has finally expressed what many were thinking: The EU would neither be ready for enlargement, nor Georgia for the EU. Their motivation seems clear: the candidate status is evidently enough for the ruling party.

Ultimately, the announcement that a law on ‘foreign influence’ would be taken out of the drawer was the cause of the breach of trust: last year, thousands of people actually brought down this project, which was aimed at Georgia's vital civil society. Its contents are quite something: organisations that receive more than 20 per cent of their project funding from international partners must register as an ‘organisation representing the interests of foreign states’. The ruling party justifies this with the requirement for transparency and references European models. That said, Georgia already has a high level of transparency in place and the comparison is also misleading: The only country to have a similar scheme was Hungary, but this was overturned by the European Court of Justice. And frankly, what is the purpose of portraying an environmental organisation that implements a project with international assistance as a stooge of foreign states? Or even better: an anti-corruption NGO that campaigns for the freedom of the judiciary? Are they not acting in Georgia's own best interests?

Read more from the original article on here at www.ips-journal.eu.

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