This article is the second article of our three-part series on the political situation in Georgia. In the first article first article, activist Tamar Jakeli, adresses the protest and urgency of the 4th of October. In this second article Shota writes how the ultra-right as well as Georgia’s ruling party weaponizes gender and Europe’s inaction while this happens. 

Queers, traitors, liberalism, and Western warmongers – the four horsemen of an oligarch’s manufactured apocalypse now define Georgia’s new official ideology. Each serves a use: queers to ignite moral panic, traitors’ to justify repression, ‘liberalism’ and Western warmongers to discredit pro-western democratic aspirations and surrender to Moscow. Meanwhile, Europe’s response remains theatrical, offering symbolic penalties for elites to disguise a deeper inaction. 

How the oligarch consolidated his power 

On 11 October, United Neutral Georgia, an anti-Western satellite group run by Georgian government, came up with yet another demand for a referendum on whether Georgians would still consent to their country joining the EU, where ‘children are allowed to change gender’ without parental consent and where ‘criticism of LGBTQ+ propaganda is punished under criminal law’.[1] Make no mistake: this is not a fringe movement but the Georgian government speaking through it.

Former prime minister and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, who has ruled Georgia informally for most of the past thirteen years, created United Neutral Georgia to test-market authoritarian ideas later adopted by his Georgian Dream party: banning opposition groups,[2] investigating civic organisations,[3] and curbing media access in courts[4] are already more than their proposals. It is only a matter of time before the oligarch responds to this engineered demand too and frees his loyalists from the constitutional obligation[5] to seek EU and NATO membership.

oudpremier georgie
Former prime minister and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, Source: AFP
PM Georgië bij CPAC
PM Irakli Kobakhidze at CPAC; source: government.ge

Queer panic as political weapon 

Officially, Georgian Dream insists it loves Europe, just not the one that actually exists. So it is little wonder that Ivanishvili’s loyalists now sing along with those crafting an ‘alternative Europe’ in the name of sovereignty and moral purity. 

In May 2025, Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, where he denounced what he termed ‘liberal fascism,’ ‘gender and LGBT propaganda,’ and the influence of the ‘Deep State’.[6] His speech was music to the ears of Georgia’s newfound ally, Hungary’s far-right leader Viktor Orbán and of other European speakers at the event, including Czechia’s upcoming leader Andrej Babiš. 

Georgia joins Europe’s Far-Right chorus

Georgia’s ideological pivot is not isolated, it mirrors a broader illiberal alliance stretching from Budapest to Moscow. Kobakhidze’s trip to Budapest came as Ivanishvili faced mounting protests at home and accusations of siding with Moscow as he had been busy building an autocratic order under his informal rule. Instead of European reforms, the oligarch chose repression – reviving ‘foreign agent’ laws, cutting off foreign funding for broadcasters, jailing critics, and criminalising queer rights advocacy. Under his watch, Georgia fell out of step with its former Associated Trio partners, Ukraine and Moldova, who raced toward the EU after Russia’s full-scale invasion. 

Shortly before Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine, Georgia’s far-right scene, long divided over foreign policy,[7] was abruptly overtaken by an openly pro-Russian group Alt Info. Built on transphobia and opposition to queer events, Alt Info echoed Russian, Italian, and Hungarian anti-gender campaigns, shortly before their messages were taken up by the ruling party to drive its own anti-Western campaign.

Protest Day 17 Ends at Ivanishvili’s Home with ‘March For Freedom’
Protest at Ivanishvili’s Home with ‘March For Freedom’ source: Eana Korbezashvili/Civil.ge

Brussels speaks hard words but acts softly

From 2022 onward, and especially before the 2024 elections, Georgians struggling with unaffordable prices and lack of infrastructure were treated to a moral panic imported wholesale from Western ultra-conservatives. Officials and the media run by them raged over an Elton John-themed Happy Meal[8] booklet and ‘men’s milk’ supposedly being treated the same as women’s in Europe. Days before the vote, Ivanishvili himself recycled these claims for voters who cared more about jobs than gay panic and gender hysteria.[9]

Many dismissed the government’s crusade against ‘gender’ concept, campaigning to ‘protect’ minors from so-called ‘gay propaganda’, and ranting about a Western ‘Deep State’ dragging Georgia into war with Russia as mere election theatre. Some even urged leading queer voices not to respond to the campaign of hate. But the rhetoric did not fade with the vote; it laid the groundwork for Georgia’s open slide into authoritarian rule.

 

“ It is not the EU’s job to save Georgia’s democracy. That responsibility lies with Georgians, and the reckoning must start at home. ”

For years, too many looked away as the government picked off environmental groups, queer activists, opposition figures, and journalists one by one, refusing to see them as targets of the same emerging system. Moreover, Georgia’s loudest ‘anti-oligarchic’ liberal voices still have no vision for bringing big capital, Russian or otherwise, under democratic control. Nevertheless, Europe still has the means to help Georgia remain a functioning democracy alongside Armenia in the region, and that requires confronting and correcting missteps it seems poised to repeat.

In late 2023, after months of police brutality, continued violence against Georgian queers, and an escalating clampdown on independent media and the courts, the European Council granted Georgia candidate status, a move widely seen as a reward for the government’s temporary withdrawal of its anti-civil society law. What followed was worse. The gesture convinced Ivanishvili’s entourage that declaring a whole class of citizens morally perverted, and intimidating, beating, or jailing critics, carries no cost.

A protester waves a Georgian and a European Union flags in front of riot police
A protester waves a Georgian and a European Union flags in front of riot police during an opposition rally on the day of local elections in central Tbilisi on October 4, 2025, source: Giorgi Arjevanidze/AFP

A roadmap for real political pressure 

As the EU is currently revisiting its visa-free rules to make it easier to suspend free travel for states sliding into authoritarianism or abusing EU relations, its leaders still seem poised to insist they will not hurt ordinary Georgians with broad measures, preferring instead to target the elite by tinkering with visa privileges.[10] Eighteen months after the Georgian authorities passed offshore law to launder repatriated wealth into domestic power,[11] such restraint amounts to complicity. Every additional month of Europe’s talk of targeting Georgia’s repressive elite with mere visa paperwork allows more of that money to pour into the machinery of political repression.

European governments must act now: freeze the assets, sanction the intermediaries, and cut off the financial lifelines that keep the regime afloat. Hiding behind the need for unanimity among EU members to impose union-wide sanctions is no longer credible when willing states can still move faster together, synchronising their actions to hit the same networks of shell companies, trustees, and enablers that shield the oligarch’s power. It’s not about sealing every loophole in Europe, but about ending the illusion among Ivanishvili’s political, security, and business allies that shouting about ‘sovereignty’ and ‘family values’ will keep their money safe and their doors to the West open.

 

about the author: 

Shota Kincha is a Tbilisi-based freelance researcher focusing on authoritarianism, nationalism, media, gender, and queer politics. He previously worked as a journalist, including as a Václav Havel Journalism Fellow with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague and as a staff writer at the regional outlet OC Media, covering politics and civil society in Georgia and the wider Caucasus. Before his career in journalism, Shota was active in citizen journalism and queer rights advocacy and taught part-time at two universities in Tbilisi. His research experience also includes work at the Social Justice Center on media, activism, and gender. He holds an MSc in Nationalism Studies from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in History and Theory of Culture from Tbilisi State University.

Tamar Jakeli

LOCAL ELECTIONS WON'T SAVE GEORGIA: ONLY ITS PEOPLE CAN

Check out the first article of our three-part series on on the political situation in Georgia!

Sources: 

[1] United Neutral Georgia’s statement, Facebook, 11 October 2025.

[2] Georgian government announces plan to outlaw political opposition. Eurasianet. October, 2025.

[3] Prosecutors Summon NGO Heads to Testify in ‘Sabotage’ Probe. Civil.ge. September 2025.

[4] The Georgian Dream restricts media coverage from court premises. Media Freedom Rapid Response. June, 2025.

[5] Constitution of Georgia, chapter 7.

[6] Irakli Kobakhidze beszéde a CPACHungary 2025-n. Alapjogokért Központ. Youtube.

[7] Nino Gozalishvili, “Proving the ‘European Way’: The West in Georgian Far-Right Discourse,” Caucasus Analytical Digest, No. 129 (2022)

[8] “Propagating filth”: Kaladze joins GD’s homophobic campaign against McDonalds. Formula, 19 June 2023.

[9] "Men's milk, women's pads, the trial of the opposition" – a pre-election interview with Bidzina Ivanishvili. Jamnews. 22 October 2024.

[10] Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, ‘EU Edges Closer To New Visa Suspension Rules Amid Concerns Over Georgia’, 6 October, 2025.

[11] Georgian Dream eliminates taxes on offshore assets brought to Georgia. OC Media. April, 2024.