TBILISI, October 20 – The opposition party For Georgia (“sakartvelostvis”) said on Monday it will end its year-long boycott of the legislature, switching sides among a deeply divided opposition.
With party founder Giorgi Gakharia currently in exile, the dramatic switchover was announced at a press briefing by a deputy leader, Giorgi Sharashidze, and means the party will take up 12 seats in the 150-member assembly. The party has named 12 new MPs to replace those members whose mandates were terminated at the start of the boycott.
Sharashidze told journalists that the boycott, launched after the October 26, 2024 parliamentary election, failed to stop what the party calls a slide toward authoritarianism. He said the boycott removed the opposition from the political arena and allowed the ruling Georgian Dream party to act “without resistance,” resulting in laws and decisions the party describes as anti-democratic. Sharashidze said the opposition must stop isolating itself and return to representative institutions to defend dissenting voices.
In a lengthy statement read at the briefing, the party blamed itself for not convincing the public last year that cancelling parliamentary mandates was a mistake. It said the October 4 events and subsequent developments had further weakened the opposition, led to arrests of demonstrators and journalists, and been accompanied by what the party described as “new anti-democratic laws” and an education reform announcement that it sees as restricting European-style education. The statement also accused the government of mounting anti-European propaganda and of attacks on foreign envoys.
The For Georgia party framed its move as a strategic pivot: it said it will use all parliamentary and municipal platforms to represent citizens and to protect pluralism, arguing that avoiding those institutions in the current crisis would be “not only a mistake, but a crime against the country and the people.”
The party called for a return to reasoned, moderate politics at all levels amid what it described as rising intolerance and polarization.
