Georgia government renews foreign agent law attempt. EU wants “unconditional withdrawal”

Brussels – Here we go again. Despite mass protests that had already blocked the project in March 2023, and despite the conditions attached to the EU candidate country status granted four months ago, Georgia’s government is at it again with the controversial pro-Russian memory ‘Transparency of Foreign Influence’ bill before the dissolution of Parliament ahead of the upcoming October 26 election round. There are already new mass protests on the streets of the capital, Tbilisi, supported by Brussels, as they were a year ago. “The European Union recalls the public pledge of the Georgian government and the ruling party to ‘unconditionally withdraw’ such legislation,” the spokesman for the European External Action Service (EEAS), Peter Stano, warned today (April 4) in response to the ruling Georgian Dream party’s announcement. “The EU regrets that it is once again being considered despite strong public and international reactions” last year.

The Georgian Dream leadership  (now led by former premier Irakli Garibashvili) announced to Parliament yesterday afternoon (April 3) that it will make another attempt to pass the law after amending only one passage of the bill: All organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad will have to register as an ‘organization pursuing the interests of a foreign power’ and not as an ‘agent of foreign influence.’ For pro-democracy opposition groups in the country and Brussels, however, the substance does not change, and they still fear an alignment with what has been in force in Russia since December 1, 2022. “Creating and maintaining an enabling environment for civil society organizations and ensuring media freedom is at the core of democracy,” the EEAS spokesman Stano made clear, warning that it is also “crucial for the EU accession process.”

Brussels is putting pressure precisely on this level to make Georgia’s newly appointed  Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, desist after assuring, just over a month ago, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell that “by 2030 Georgia will be ready more than any other candidate country for membership.” The EU candidate country status that the European Council granted on December 14, 2023, was conditioned on “taking the relevant steps” outlined in the Commission’s recommendation in the 2023 Enlargement Package, including recommendations on “civil society being able to operate freely” and on “combating disinformation against the EU and its values,” Stano noted: “Transparency should not be used as an instrument to limit civil society’s capacity to operate freely.”

Meanwhile, in the capital Tbilisi, new mass demonstrations are being prepared along the lines of those on March 7-8, 2023, when – after Parliament passed the law in its first reading – tens of thousands of Georgian citizens had taken to the streets with the flags of Georgia and the European Union, shouting slogans such as Fuck Russian law and papering the city with insults to Putin. After two days of uninterrupted protests, the Georgian Dream party had withdrawn the bill, but without retracting the initiative, as events a year later show. “Georgia’s European path cannot be stopped. Nobody can restore the past,”  the President of the Republic, Salomé Nino Zourabichvili, attacked in a post on X,  adding that “no Russian law, nor any other destructive policy can prevent a determined nation from achieving its goal.” That is, entry into the European Union, as the Georgian leader made it clear from the podium of the European Parliament in Brussels last year.

The complex relationship between the EU and Georgia

Despite being granted candidate status for EU membership, the relationship between Brussels and Tbilisi remains particularly complex due to the divergence between an overwhelmingly pro-EU population and a government that is controversial about pro-Russian tendencies, to say the least (even though it applied to join the Union due to fears of the Kremlin’s expansionism). Not only is there an evident difficulty in implementing the reforms required on the path to the Union, but over the past two years, there have been incidents that have highlighted the ambiguity of the ruling Georgian Dream party – whose founder is the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili, who appears in the non-binding resolution of the EU Parliament calling for personal sanctions against him. For example, in May last year, flights between Georgia and Russia resumed after Moscow’s decision to lift the existing ban, and the Caucasian country never aligned with restrictive measures introduced by Brussels against the Kremlin after the invasion of Ukraine. Last fall, the government also attempted to impeach (and failed) the President of the Republic for a series of trips to the European Union that allegedly violated the powers of the Head of State under the national Constitution.

Between the decision by Brussels in June 2022 not to grant Georgia candidate status yet, there were two large pro-EU demonstrations in Tbilisi: the ‘March for Europe’ to reiterate the people’s alignment with the values of the Union and a public square call for the government to resign. The common features of these demonstrations were the flags –white and red of the five crosses (national) and with the twelve stars on a blue background — signs with pro-European claims and the Georgian anthem interspersed with the Ode to Joy. Before the outbreak of harsh mass protests in March 2023 – supported by Brussels – which at least so far have helped shelve the controversial ‘Transparency of Foreign Influence’ bill.

In this scenario, one should not forget Georgia’s delicate relationship with Russia, a country with which it borders to the north. Its candidacy for EU and NATO membership – enshrined in its national constitution – has long been a cause of tension with the Kremlin. After conflicts in the 1990s with the two separatist regions of South Ossetia (1991-1992) and Abkhazia (1991-1993) after Georgia’s 1991 independence from the Soviet Union, the situation on the ground was effectively frozen for 15 years, with troops of the newly formed Russian Federation defending the secessionists within the claimed territory. The attempt to reassert Tbilisi’s control over the two regions in the summer of 2008 – that the President at the time, Mikheil Saakashvili, wanted -led to a violent Russian reaction on August 7, not only in repelling the Georgian army’s offensive but also leading to the invasion of the rest of the national territory with tanks and air raids for five days. Since then, Vladimir Putin‘s Russia has recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and has deployed thousands of soldiers to the two territories to increase its sphere of influence in the Ciscaucasian region, in violation of the August 12, 2008 agreements.