TBILISI, November 28 – The same day as Georgia’s opposition is staging a mass rally, parliament speaker Shalva Papuashvili launched a fierce attack on domestic critics and the country’s Western partners.
Papuashvili spoke to journalists in parliament on Friday, one year after mass protests turned violent outside the same building on 28 November 2024. He said those events were not a peaceful demonstration gone wrong but a coordinated attempt to storm the legislature.
According to the speaker, the scene echoed the early 1990s, when the parliament building was shelled during Georgia’s civil conflict. He described last year’s protest as involving violence against police, attempts to break into the chamber and even an effort to set the building on fire. “This violence needed to be dealt with” and the police acted correctly, Papuashvili argued, adding that any questions about possible excessive force should be addressed to the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor’s Office.
Looking back at the protest waves of the past year, Papuashvili said Georgians would one day remember this period “with bitter irony,” claiming that part of the public had been “zombified” and “brainwashed” by false narratives. In his words, these lies were carried through Tbilisi’s streets under the flag of the European Union.
His comments come as opposition groups have called a new rally in the capital for 28 November. Some critics of the government are keeping their distance. Earlier this week, Giorgi Sharashidze, leader of one small opposition party, said his group would not take part in organizing the protest, even as he harshly questioned the ruling party’s handling of a controversial development deal with UAE-based investor Eagle Hills.
If Papuashvili’s language toward the domestic opposition was tough, his words for Brussels were even sharper. In a separate statement on Friday, he said “Brussels today has become a symbol of hypocrisy,” accusing European institutions of trying to influence Georgian politics with opaque money flows. Georgia’s legislation requires transparency in lobbying and political funding, he stressed, and “Brussels should respect Georgian law and stop secret financing.”
The speaker went further, claiming that “Brussels and European politicians wanted a Maidan here,” referring to the 2013–14 uprising in Kyiv. According to him, outside actors were seeking “bloodshed, chaos and bringing their own puppets to power” in Georgia. He said that for more than a year the country had faced “externally managed terror.”
Papuashvili also pointed to Ukraine as a warning sign, arguing that Kyiv has lost real sovereignty to its Western backers. “Today Ukraine not only cannot decide on starting or ending the war, it cannot even decide whom to arrest and whom to release,” he said, adding that “under the banner of a struggle for sovereignty they have completely given up their sovereignty.”
The ruling Georgian Dream party has spent the past two years in an open feud with parts of the European establishment over its laws on foreign funding and lobbying, as well as over its stance on the war in Ukraine.
Friday’s rally marks one year since Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze declared a freeze in membership negotiations with the European Union until 2028.
