TBILISI, November 19 – A recent meeting among parliamentarians across Europe turned into a stage for Georgia’s domestic politics this week, as both ruling party and opposition traded blows.
The spat began in Istanbul during one of the regular meetings of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE), which draws together elected representatives from across the wider Eurasian landmass to discuss topics like democracy and human rights.
Tina Bokuchava, chair of Georgia’s largest opposition party United National Movement (UNM), announced that a special resolution on Georgia had been adopted. She said the text, initiated by the European People’s Party (EPP) group, describes “authoritarian steps” and “political repression” under what she called Bidzina Ivanishvili’s regime, and urges international partners to use every available tool, including targeted financial measures, to limit the government’s ability to use corrupt money to entrench power.
The ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party immediately hit back. Several senior MPs argued that the EPP text is being deliberately presented as if it were an official resolution of the full OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.
According to Interpressnews, vice speaker Nino Tsilosani called the European People’s Party (EPP) the “mother party” of UNM and said that if it drives a resolution, Georgians should assume from the start that “something is wrong” with the process. She argued that corruption cases in Georgia have already been investigated by domestic law enforcement and suggested that EPP politicians should pay more attention to corruption scandals in their own ranks at European level.
Another Georgian Dream MP, Maia Bitadze, wrote that Bokuchava and veteran opposition figure Gigi Tsereteli had been “walking the corridors” of the OSCE event for two days and then tried to pass off their own positions as decisions of the organization. Bitadze stressed that the EPP has no formal mandate “in the OSCE format” and pointed out that the information circulated by the opposition does not appear on official OSCE platforms. In her words, using the OSCE name to spread such messages amounts to “betrayal” of Georgia.
First vice speaker Gia Volski struck a similar tone, saying that the way the story was presented made it sound as if the entire OSCE Parliamentary Assembly had adopted a resolution on Georgia, which he called a new form of political sabotage. He personally criticized Tsereteli, who has long experience in OSCE structures, for allegedly helping craft what he described as a misleading narrative.
Gigi Tsereteli, now leader of the opposition party European Georgia and a former OSCE PA president, rejected those accusations. He said he never claimed that the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly as a whole had voted on the document. According to Tsereteli, the resolution was adopted by the EPP group inside the assembly, not by the full plenary, and its spirit is similar to a strongly worded resolution on Georgia that the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly adopted in Portugal several months earlier. He accused the government of trying to avoid discussion of the substance of international criticism by focusing on procedural technicalities.
The clash over the EPP text comes at a sensitive time for Georgia’s foreign policy. Tsilosani also linked it to what she described as a “biased” approach in the European Union, pointing to the fact that Georgia was not invited to a recent EU enlargement forum despite, in her view, being among the leading candidate countries on reforms and economic performance. She argued that Tbilisi is being “punished” because a favored opposition group has not come to power.
At the same time, the head of parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Nikoloz Samkharadze, used the same OSCE Parliamentary Assembly (OSCE PA) session to push Georgia’s core security message: that Russian occupation and its humanitarian fallout should stay high on the international agenda.
Samkharadze, who leads Georgia’s delegation to the OSCE PA, addressed the assembly’s human rights session on Tuesday 18 November. According to parliament’s press service, he focused on people displaced from the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia during the wars of the early 1990s and in 2008, and on those who still live near the dividing lines. He described those conflicts as having involved ethnic cleansing and said rights of those who stayed behind continue to be violated.
The committee chair underlined that ethnically Georgian children in the occupied territories are not allowed to receive schooling in the Georgian language. He also spoke of attempts to erase Georgian cultural heritage, mentioning damage or destruction of churches, cemeteries and houses that belonged to ethnic Georgians.
Samkharadze told delegates that the government has provided permanent housing to around 61,000 displaced families in recent years. He also highlighted the presence of about 30,000 Ukrainian refugees in Georgia since Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, saying they enjoy the same rights and benefits as Georgian internally displaced persons.
