Georgia’s EU integration was already ‘de facto suspended’, ruling party MP

Giorgi Chakvetadze, a member of the parliamentary majority, has claimed that the country’s European integration process had been “de facto and unilaterally suspended” months before mass protests erupted in Tbilisi in late 2024.

The MP wrote on Monday that a letter from EU Ambassador Paweł Herczyński - sent on 5 November to Georgia’s First Deputy Foreign Minister - “confirmed” that demonstrations held in November and December last year were “entirely based on disinformation.”

Chakvetadze said that on 11 November he publicly asked the EU Ambassador why, in his view, the public had been “misled” and “brought into the streets”. He added that six days later, he still had not received a reply.

According to the MP, the European Council’s statement of 27 June 2024 marked the point at which Georgia’s EU integration “was already halted in practice”, meaning that Tbilisi “could not physically suspend something that had already been suspended from the other side.”

“It is regrettable that we have not received an answer to this question for six days,” Chakvetadze wrote.