Nfter two days of huge protests, Georgia’s ruling party announced on Thursday morning that it would withdraw the law on “foreign influence agents”. The opposition celebrated this as a victory for the mostly young demonstrators, and the EU reacted with relief: “We welcome the ruling party’s announcement,” said the EU delegation in Georgia.
But the jubilation is mixed with skepticism and distrust of the government in Georgian civil society. Because the joint statement by the “Georgian Dream” and the openly anti-Western faction “People Power”, which originally introduced the law, reads like the opposite of an actual retreat: “The lying machine managed to portray the draft law in a negative light and to mislead a certain segment of the public,” it said. It was given the false label of a “Russian law” with the result that “radical forces were able to implicate part of the youth in illegal activities”.
On Thursday night, the security forces were unable to completely break up the protests of several tens of thousands of people. Tight lines of police officers with shields and helmets were initially able to push the demonstrators back from Rustaveli Boulevard in front of the parliament in Tbilisi with the support of water cannons and tear gas grenades, but over the course of the night a crowd of what is believed to be several thousand people managed to get back in front of the parliament to pull. Others gathered in the surrounding streets and at the Palace of Justice, a few minutes’ walk away. The demonstrators only dispersed in the early hours of the morning.
Demonstrators dance to the sound of sirens
Some demonstrators reacted violently to police action. They threw stones and, in some cases, Molotov cocktails. Windows were smashed at the Parliament building; a police car was overturned on a side street. But most of the demonstrators remained peaceful. Various videos from Tbilisi showed them dancing in the streets to the sound of police sirens. The government’s representation that the protests were the work of hooligans also came to nothing because numerous normally non-political organizations and prominent artists and athletes had opposed the “agent law” in the past few days for example the record football champions Dynamo Tbilisi.
The statement of the “Georgian Dream” says that after the emotions have cooled off, “we will better explain to the public what the request was for and why it was important to ensure transparency of foreign influence in our country”. For this purpose there will be meetings with the population “to let the general public know the truth about every detail of the matter”. That doesn’t sound like the announced “unconditional” abandonment of the project, but rather like the preparation of a large-scale campaign for it.
The opposition and civil society are also fueling distrust because the first statement by the two majority parties did not mention how to proceed or the timeframe for doing so. According to the rules of procedure of the Georgian parliament, the draft law can no longer be withdrawn, since it was already adopted in the first reading on Tuesday. It must be rejected at second reading. The faction leadership of the “Georgian Dream” only announced during the course of the day that this should happen – but when did they leave it open. MPs are not in session this week.
The broken promises of the past
In the past, the “Georgian Dream” has repeatedly not kept to its own announcements, which it made under the impression of mass protests. That was the case, for example, in the summer of 2019. At that time, large demonstrations lasting several days were sparked by the fact that the leadership of the ruling party had allowed a nationalist Russian MP to lead a discussion from the speaker’s seat during an event organized by the international association of Christian-Orthodox parliamentarians . The Russian parliamentarian had earlier supported the Russian army’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 and voted to recognize the de facto Russian-occupied territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as “independent states”.
At that time, too, the government initially failed to end the protests, despite the use of massive force – around 240 demonstrators were injured. The situation only calmed down after a promise was made to meet one of the demonstrators’ demands – the introduction of proportional representation. That promise was broken a few months later. Had it been held, the Georgian Dream would no longer have a majority of seats in parliament since the autumn 2020 election.
The opposition has therefore called for another demonstration on Thursday evening. “The protests will not stop until Georgia is guaranteed to adopt a pro-Western course,” announced a politician from the opposition Girchi party.