Georgia’s accession to the EU: it’s over (for now)
By Flavia Faraone
Georgia was granted “candidate status” by the European Commission in 2023. However, an authoritarian turn by its leading party over the summer has led all negotiations to a halt. Recently, allegations of rigged elections financed by Russia have seemingly pushed the EU even farther away from the country. Where does this leave Georgia’s educated, Europe-minded youth?
With one in four people aged twenty-nine or less, Georgia is a young country. At the same time, it scores highest in youth unemployment compared to its neighbors. It will then not come as a surprise that 63% of young Georgians believe that their interests are poorly represented in national politics. This is especially true for those who hold a university degree. Indeed, the situation for young educated Georgians is precarious at best, as masses of them leave major cities to move to capital Tbillisi or to Europe to find employment, often in NGOs financed by Western countries. 80% of young Georgians support the country’s accession to the European Union.
Georgian Dream, the party that has ruled the country for the last twelve years, has significant political and economic ties to Russia. Initially pro-European, it has taken an increasingly authoritarian turn, showing more and more hostility towards opposition and employing bitterly anti-LGBT propaganda. In August 2024, Georgian Dream passed a law to limit “foreign agents’ influence” in national politics. The law requires that non-governmental organizations which receive 20% or more of their funding from abroad register themselves as “pursuing the interests of a foreign power”. Similar acts have already been passed elsewhere with disastrous consequences on civil society: in Russia, the 2012 “law on foreign agents” resulted in a third of the country’s NGOs closing in the span of two years. The Georgian act has already had repercussions on the international sphere: crucially, it has caused Georgia’s accession negotiations to the EU to come to a crashing halt. This sparked an outrage among the country’s pro-EU electorate, resulting in protests which lasted over three weeks. Photographs from the demonstrations show a huge amount of young people who can remarkably be seen waving both Georgian and European flags in equal numbers.
A great number of young people gathered again in Tbillisi in late October, after the 26/10 general elections confirmed Georgian Dream as the leading party in the country. The elections sparked enormous controversies, with Georgian Dream being accused of rigging them in order to cling to power. Indeed, multiple witnesses have reported the elections as being marred by violence at the polling stations and procedural irregularities in the counting of the ballots. Moreover, independent international observers have accused Georgian Dream of Russia-backed vote buying, in a similar fashion as the October elections in Moldova, for which Putin allegedly spent a whopping €150 million despite ongoing struggles in Ukraine. The protests were called personally by Georgian president Salome Zourabichvili, who termed the elections a “Russian special operation” and has called for Georgia’s democratic partners, like the EU, to investigate the results of the elections separately. Peaceful protests were thus carried out in Tbillisi, with tens of thousands of attendees waving European and Georgian flags. Representatives from the pro-EU opposition coalition, “Unity - National Movement”, also spoke out in protest against the alleged rigging. This time, however, the demonstrations were disbanded after only two days, with protesters being dispersed by the police and no further action being taken on either the government or the people’s side.
On the general democratic backsliding of the country, EU ambassador to Georgia Pawel Herczynski has said “This year, Georgia has gone backwards”. High Representative Josep Borrel has also expressed concern over the way in which the elections were carried out, highlighting that they were not “free and fair”. It seems, then, that negotiations for Georgia’s accession to the Union will remain frozen for the foreseeable future. What’s more, , with the opposition coalition having potentially been forced out of office, the European ambitions of young Georgians might have been dealt a fatal blow.
