by Francis Tuschek, Staff Writer
The European Union’s threat that it would end visa-free travel for Georgians is just extortion ahead of the parliamentary elections, the mayor of Tbilisi has said.
Georgians are currently able to visit EU countries inside the Schengen Zone for up to six months without a visa, but Brussels said last week it could “temporarily suspend” the 2017 deal because of alleged “democratic decline” in the former Soviet republic.
“This is the usual blackmail I’ve been talking about,” Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze told reporters on Monday. “The closer we are to the elections, the more intense such statements will be.”
Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze has previously used the phrase “cheap blackmail” to describe EU threats to tamper with the visa agreement.
Parliamentary elections in Georgia are scheduled for October 26. The ruling Georgian Dream party is currently polling far ahead of the opposition United National Movement (UNM), founded by the pro-US former president Mikhail Saakashvili.
Last Monday, the US sanctioned several Georgian Dream leaders, accusing them of passing “Russian-style” laws that threatened democracy in Tbilisi. The following day, the Georgian parliament adopted a ban on “LGBT and gender reassignment propaganda,” which the EU condemned as contrary to Tbilisi’s desire to join the bloc.
Georgia has also adopted a watered-down version of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) targeting foreign-funded nongovernmental organizations, which came into effect in June despite EU and US attempts to see it overruled.
Kaladze described the NGOs as “pests” who “make political statements and run around Brussels to somehow harm the country and our European integrations,” alleging that the so-called nonprofits have blurred all the lines between themselves and political organizations.
“There are no Georgian NGOs,” the mayor of Tbilisi told the national broadcaster 1TV. “It’s a network of agencies that cost hundreds of millions of foreign dollars to run the country from the outside.”
Kaladze shrugged off the possibility of the EU actually ending visa-free travel for Georgians, describing it as “a complex bureaucratic procedure” that can’t happen on a whim.
At a recent campaign rally, Georgian Dream leader Bidzina Ivanishvili announced that Tbilisi intends to apologize for Saakashvili starting the war with Russia in 2008.