The New People’s Movement managed to change the Georgian reality. The number of people they managed to gather for the rally on Rustaveli Avenue was unprecedented. On June 20, 140,000 people came out to show the EU that Georgia deserves membership candidate status. It seems that for Brussels this rally was not enough to change the decision. The EU approved the recommendation from the European Commission which gave Georgia 6 months to prepare before finally deciding whether to give Georgia the candidacy status. On the same day, people gathered again on Rustaveli Avenue, where the leader of the New People’s Movement, Shota Dighmelashvili, voiced their demands. We Interviewed Mr. Dighmelashvili before the rally.
So far the ruling party hasn’t considered accepting your proposal. What’s going to be the next step of the people’s movement if Prime Minister Garibashvili does not resign?
We’ve been in this situation before. We had to do a hundred-day consecutive protest in order to achieve our demand which was the amendment of the constitution to proportional elections. Non-violence is the religion for us, it’s not only the ideological choice but also pragmatic, because it’s more inclusive, first of all, and it doesn’t give the propaganda an upper hand to paint you as a radical. Well, they do develop this narrative but we need to make it harder for them to picture us as some radicals with groundless demands. But the demand we placed three years ago, I mean the proportional elections, still remains as a promise from the shadow ruler himself. He even promised this to the international community and president Zourabichvili was also among those, who promised this. We’ll continue to push for the issue which will make our country more democratic. By the way, Western integration is even embedded in our constitution so those two narratives come in line and are overlapping each other, so we are pushing in that direction, in every way we can.
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You said that forming a government with national consent will fulfill the depolarization and the deoligarchization demands from the EU. But what’s the point of forming a new government if most of the demands are related to Parliament?
The government is consensual, so we are leaving some space for discussion, so that’s why we are not proposing the exact model but we could imagine one of those models as like: Having three delegates from the civic society, from the respected international NGOs for example and three delegates from the opposition and three from the ruling party sitting together and with full consensuses, like cherry-picking the professionals who could head the various directions in the government. You are quite right that the parliament would need to prove the amendments put forth by the government but in the Georgian context, we see what the parliament is. It’s more than a notary office and not a place for discussion. There’s always a risk that the Georgian Dream will promise something and then will reject to do it but what else could we propose? What we see in the rallies, which were the biggest after the 9th of April rally in 1989, means that there is a huge public demand for the ruling party to compromise and we hope that the internal and external pressure, as well as, the agreement, the consensus of the society might be the best way out of the crisis.
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This year President Zurabichvili visited several European countries to convince our partners to give us EU candidacy status, but the ruling party was not satisfied with her independent diplomacy. If this, so-called people’s movement, manages to form a new government, will you support the President to continue her diplomatic mission?
When civic society organizes rallies, it’s the maximum we can do, because we don’t have any more leverages, but the president does. The president can pardon anyone, and can veto the laws which she criticizes, the justice system was one of the main problems mentioned in these twelve points, proposed by the European Union and she could interfere there as well. So, what we see – the civic society does its maximum, like having one of the biggest rallies Georgian has ever seen, while we see the president rhetorically supporting the consolidation, the Euro integration but not doing her best. Yes, she can plan some visits and we fully support those visits we even invited her to our rally, we even had her at our Ukrainian solidarity rally. So, we are really open, we’d like her to take initiative and do as much as she can, to push the agenda of Euro-Atlantic integration and the agenda of depolarization. We expect more and we see that she doesn’t. She doesn’t use all the leverages she has so here we are a bit skeptical about her initiatives and about her role, but we’d like to see her doing more.
On June 20, Georgia had the biggest pro-European rally, but this date wasn’t chosen by accident. The 20th of June is related to the former Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia, who is currently in the opposition. Will we see you and your past enemy Gakharia and his party standing next to each other?
Giorgi Gakharia at that period of time was the Minister of Internal Affairs. The reason why we demanded his resignation was that bloody crackdown on that day when up to fifty journalists were hurt and people lost their eyes because the special forces were deliberately performing headshots with rubber bullets, which are prohibited to be used on people. The 20th of June protest was against the Georgian government and then Gakharia reacted the way he reacted and that’s why we came up with the demand for his resignation but the main demand was the proportional elections. We addressed each and every political party very clearly, we said that if they join the demands we have no right to say that they can not join our rallies but these rallies are run by the civic society, civic society organizations and these people don’t want to see any of the acting politicians in the national unity government as well. They should be chosen from the civic society. If some supporters of Gakharia come to the rally, we have no problems. We are not cherry-picking who comes, like other opposition parties and their supporters are presented and we wish that the supporters of the Georgian Dream party will come there as well. Actually, we see them coming to the rally but neither of them has a place on the stage.
For years, you’ve been shouting out loud that Georgia has an oligarch and he has to be removed, but before 2022, our European partners never mentioned Bidzina Ivanishvili in any of their resolutions. Why didn’t they listen to you before?
We didn’t shout loud enough, I guess… So, the situation in Ukraine has crystallized a lot of things and lots of problems and lots of positions. What we used to see within Europe and also the West in general, was the policy of appeasement towards Russia, no matter what atrocities they have committed but now it’s changing. Europe has united, also NATO has reinvented itself and Europe is united as never before so I consider this as one of the reasons why they changed their position with Mr. Ivanishvili. The other one is that he is the Russian oligarch, who has gained all his fortune in Russia and then bought the country for himself to keep his assets safe, and now it’s perceived as a bigger problem for the West, I think. Because the security framework in the region is changing and lots of things are changing as well, the attitude I mean and I think that’s a huge contributor to their decision to see the shadow ruler we are having right now as an oligarch, as a person who he really is.
