The next important date is December 14, when they are going to hold some kind of election in the parliament building, the legitimacy of which no one recognizes – we are going to continue the protest, – one of the leaders of the Coalition for Change party, Zurab Girchi Japaridze, said at a press conference on Wednesday.
Japaridze listed the points of the opposition parties’ strategic plan, including the international non-recognition of the elections. He highlighted in particular the statement of EU ambassador Paweł Herczyński following on from his meeting with Georgian Dream’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maka Bochorishvili, and noted that the meeting “presented a problem”.
“We have several strategic directions, and by ‘we’, I mean the four political groups that received the legitimacy of the people and actually won the elections. We continue to work on preventing the recognition of the Russian regime by political players inside the country. As of this moment, no one is going to enter this parliament.
“The second direction is non-recognition of this regime by the population. We can see that the protest is continuous and has covered not only the capital, but practically all large populated areas in this country. I have been standing in Rustaveli since 1988, and I don’t remember so many people coming out together in the city, that is, the non-recognition on the part of the population continues. Moreover, this is happening against the backdrop of more than 500 people being abducted and detained. About 350 of them were beaten, most of them were practically tortured, and 100 of them were hospitalized, including 90 media representatives, who were physically assaulted by the police or “Titushkas”.
“Despite such an atmosphere of terror, people are standing in the streets. Every evening, tens of thousands of people come out in Tbilisi alone, there are protests every day in the capital and other cities as well.
“The next direction is to help people arrested and physically injured during the protest. Within our resources, we provide legal assistance to these people. However, our resources are limited. Therefore, I would like to thank several funds that are already functioning and helping people pay for treatment and attorneys’ fees, among them they have publicly announced that people who will leave the public sector in protest or are fired because of a publicly stated position will be financially assisted. This work is very important, because the work of opposition political groups alone cannot achieve all this.
“The next direction is foreign non-recognition. As of this moment, no country has been added that recognizes this Russian regime, they remain recognized by Nicaragua, Venezuela, Russia and Iran. Moreover, we hear statements from various European institutions directed towards Georgia, and they are not even mentioned by the government.
“In our opinion, the problem was that the EU ambassador met with Maka Bochorishvili, the president of Georgia also registered a protest. The EU ambassador must express the common position of the EU member states, which is that no one, except Hungary, recognizes the legitimacy of this government. Therefore, it is not clear to us why it was decided to organize this meeting and then post photos, which Georgian Dream uses for propaganda and convinces a part of its voters as if everything is fine.
Finally, to sum it up, the protest will continue. The next important date is December 14, when they are going to hold some kind of election in the parliament building, the legitimacy of which no one recognizes, just as they do not recognize the legitimacy of the parliament that is currently assembled there. We are going to continue the protest. The people who come out on Rustaveli are going to continue their protest,” said Zurab Japaridze.
For the record, the presidential elections will begin at 9:00 a.m. on December 14 in the Parliament building. In the first round of the elections, the candidate who receives at least two-thirds of the votes of the entire electoral college will be considered elected. The Georgian Dream named Mikheil Kavelashvili as a presidential candidate.
