This Tuesday, May 28, the Georgian Parliament circumvented the presidential veto and definitively adopted a controversial law on foreign influence, a text which provoked very significant demonstrations and Western criticism.
Deputies from the ruling Georgian Dream party, in the majority in the chamber, adopted the law by 84 votes in favor and four against, thus sweeping away the veto that pro-Western President Salomé Zourabichvili had placed after the adoption of the controversial text in Parliament on May 14. Most opposition MPs left the chamber at the time of the vote.
The European Union said it “deeply regrets” the adoption of the text, and called on the candidate country to “return firmly to the path of the EU”. Critics of this law, who have demonstrated several times in the tens of thousands since the beginning of April, describe the text as a “Russian law”, due to its similarity to legislation on “foreign agents” used in Russia since 2012. to suppress any dissenting voice.
The law requires any NGO or media outlet receiving more than 20% of its funding from abroad to register as an “organization pursuing the interests of a foreign power” and to submit to administrative oversight. Several NGOs told AFP they expected their assets to be frozen and their work hampered when the law came into force.
Monster demonstrations
Even before the vote on Tuesday, demonstrators began to gather in front of Parliament, brandishing Georgian and European flags. A demonstration was expected in the evening, as Tbilisi has already seen, sometimes with tens of thousands of people.
If the Georgian Dream assured that the law only aimed to force media and NGOs to be transparent, the Georgian opposition and the European Union denounced anti-democratic legislation, incompatible with the ambitions displayed by this former Soviet republic. of the Caucasus to eventually join the EU. Opponents and analysts interviewed by AFP also see it as a particularly threatening instrument of repression five months before the legislative elections planned in Georgia at the end of October, which could deprive the pro-European camp of any chance of returning to power.
“The Georgian Dream knows that it would lose power if the elections were free and fair,” said Tina Bokouchava, an MP from the opposition United National Movement party of former pro-Western president Mikheil Saakashvili. “That’s why they passed the law in the run-up to the vote, they hope to use it to silence critics.” The debate which preceded the vote on Tuesday was heated, as is often the case in Georgia. Opposition MP Girogi Vachadzé was notably doused with water while he was speaking from the podium.