After three days of demonstrations by tens of thousands of people, sometimes enamelled with violence, the Georgian Parliament finally revoked on Friday March 10 a bill compared by its detractors to repressive Russian legislation. Faced with the mobilization, the government had made the promise the day before. He also announced the release of all those arrested on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Protesters and the opposition compared the abandoned bill to a text in force in Russia used to silence opponents of the Kremlin. Concretely, the text planned to classify as “foreign agents” NGOs and media receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad, under penalty of fines.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on Friday supported Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili, who had expressed her disagreement with the government led by the Georgian Dream party. “Germany supports Georgia on the way to Europe. This path includes freedom of the press and of civil society., he added. The powers of M.me Zurabishvili, a pro-Western, are limited.
« For more than two centuries (…) the Russians have been attacking, attacking, occupying the territories of sovereign countries. What matters is what the Georgian people meant when they took to the streets once again.”said the Georgian president on the LCI channel from New York on Friday.
French President Emmanuel Macron, for his part, denounced Friday “very strong pressure” weighing on Georgia, “crossed by worrying movements”wishing “an appeasement of regional tensions”.
Like the European Union, the United States has “greeted” the decision of the Tbilisi government to withdraw the bill. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who met with the Georgian President on Friday morning, called on Georgia to respect the sanctions imposed by some 30 countries on Russia since its invasion of Ukraine. “Mr. Sullivan emphasized that Georgia must avoid being used to evade or compensate for sanctions”underlines a press release from the American executive.
“Coup” according to Moscow
Georgia, a former Soviet republic defeated in a short war against Russia in 2008, officially aims to join the European Union and NATO. But the imprisonment of former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili at the end of 2021 and several recent controversial moves by the ruling party have cast doubt on his pro-Western aspirations. Mr Saakashvili praised the “brilliant resistance” protesters against “brutal force used against them”.
Russia, for its part, presented as a « tentative » of Western coup d’etat the massive demonstrations in Georgia. The Russian presidency has said that it sees in the mobilization ” the hand “ of the United States striving to provoke “anti-Russian sentiment”. For Moscow, mobilization is a “a pretext to launch an attempt at regime change by force”, said Friday the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov. He compared the protests to the 2014 revolution in Ukraine, seen by Moscow as a coup plotted by the West that has supported Ukraine in the face of the Russian invasion for a year.
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After the rejection of the text by Parliament at second reading, nearly 300 demonstrators, according to a correspondent from Agence France-Presse, gathered peacefully in front of Parliament on Friday, with a light police presence.