🇬🇪Georgia's ruling party, @GeorgianDream41 (GD), is staging a show trial to imprison the leaders of every major opposition party at once. It is called the "sabotage case".
Sentences run up to 15 years. The outcome is predetermined.
‼️We must act before the verdicts land.
1/17 On 6 November 2025 the Prosecutor General charged 8 opposition figures. Mikheil Saakashvili, Nika Gvaramia, Nika Melia, Zurab Japaridze, Elene Khoshtaria, Giorgi Vashadze, Mamuka Khazaradze, Badri Japaridze.
Nearly every opposition leader Georgia has.
2/17

🇲🇩Moldova's government collapsed on July 3. Eight days later, President Sandu nominated Vasile Tofan as Prime Minister.
An investor who built his career backing Ukrainian and Moldovan companies now has 15 days to win parliament's confidence.
#Moldova
1/8 Who is Tofan? 44 years old. Managing partner at Horizon Capital, a fund invested in Ukraine and Moldova. Former chairman of Purcari, Moldova's flagship winery and one of its few genuine European export brands. Harvard Business School trained. He builds things that last.
2/8

🇬🇪The Council of Europe just told Georgia, in writing, what most governments only whisper: the state is dismantling the right to protest, and no police officer has been held to account for the violence used to do it.
1/9 Commissioner Michael O'Flaherty's new memorandum (19 June) finds his March 2025 warnings still unaddressed. A year on, the abuses are documented, the perpetrators named in pattern, and the prosecutions run only one way: against protesters.
2/9

🇬🇪 ATTENTION. Self-proclaimed PM Irakli Kobakhidze called former MP Giorgi Kandelaki "a formula of treason" and signaled state prosecution.
His offense? Co-authoring a Hudson Institute report on Iran's grip on Georgia.
In Georgian Dream's Georgia, this is not rhetoric.
1/10 Kobakhidze's exact words to pro-government media. "[Foreign] agents are directly involved in this, including this particular individual, who is a formula of treason."
He added that "a legal response would not be inappropriate" and named "the relevant state institutions".
2/10

🇬🇪Georgian Dream is not EU-skeptic. GD runs a calculated campaign to ensure Georgia never qualifies, never progresses, and never joins the EU.
The anti-EU rhetoric is now the strategy itself.
The last three weeks make that very visible. 👇
1/13 📷 Civil.ge Two facts the regime cannot move. Over 80% of Georgians want EU membership. EU integration is written into the constitution. The pro-Western direction is not a Western imposition. It is the codified preference of Georgian voters, repeated in every credible poll for a decade.
2/13

🇬🇪Open letter, meet open record.
PM Kobakhidze writes to von der Leyen, Costa and Metsola to lecture the EU on police violence in Copenhagen. Peaceful protesters beaten with batons, set on by dogs he claims.
Then read what his own police do, and never answer for.
1/13 👇🧵 The letter casts Georgia as the guardian of European values and Brussels as the backslider, with Denmark as the exhibit.
He picked the one subject on which his own government has the longest and best documented record.
2/13
interpressnews.ge/en/article/147…

🇬🇪🇺🇸The Trump family recently signed Georgia's tallest building. Their local partner is a former Georgian Dream MP whom US lawmakers flagged as a regime financier. The deal lands while Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD's founder, sits under active US sanctions.
1/6thedailybeast.com/trumps-sign-me… The partner is Archi Group, founded by Ilia Tsulaia. Former MP for Ivanishvili's party. Named on the sanctions-target list US lawmakers reportedly handed Marco Rubio in January 2025. He has not been sanctioned. That gap is the story. @willneal93
2/6

🇬🇪🇺🇦Georgian Dream wants one gift from the West: recognition.
GD does not want the gift Kyiv just offered: friendship.
The Yerevan handshake between Zelensky and Georgian PM Kobakhidze was not normalization. It was a strategic trap.
Here's why GD secretly hates this opening.
1/15 This is the third pressure in six weeks.
April 3: Marc Rubio's call to Kobakhidze. The gift GD wanted. Triggered Iranian and Russian counter-signals in 48 hours.
April 12: Hungary's Orbán lost his election. EU firewall gone.
May 4: Zelensky offers the gift GD did not want.
2/15

🇬🇪🇭🇺Hungary under Orbán shows that a heavily rigged electoral system can still be contested. Georgian opposition is right to study it.
But the comparison only holds if you understand precisely how different the Georgian reality is.
1/11 What Hungary demonstrates: even with gerrymandered districts, captured media, and rewritten electoral law, a resourced and organized opposition can compete for real stakes. The system was bent. It was not broken.
2/11

🇬🇪🇭🇺Viktor Orbán lost Hungary's election yesterday. For most Europeans, this is a relief. For Georgian Dream, it is a strategic catastrophe.
Their single most important protector in Europe is gone. Here's what that actually means.
1/6 @MakaB__ Since Oct. 2024, Hungary was Georgian Dream's lifeline inside the EU. Orbán blocked every attempted sanctions package against GD officials. He vetoed EU condemnation statements. He hosted GD in full government summits. Twice.
No other EU state came close to doing any of this.
2/6

🇬🇪Georgian Dream just got the Rubio call they've begged for since Jan. 2025. Highest-level US-Georgia contact in years.
Kobakhidzes propaganda called it a "reset."
Moscow and Tehran will not accept this.
Here's why that matters more than the call itself.
1/19 🇪🇺We've seen this exact script before.
December 2023: EU grants Georgia candidate status. GD absorbs the signal carefully. Tells Georgians: we are on the European path.
Within 5 months: the Russian-style foreign agents law. Within 11 months: EU accession suspended until 2028
2/19

🇬🇪This March, Georgian Dream completes its transition to a legal dictatorship.
Not a coup. Not a crackdown. A methodical dismantling of every check on power, done in plain sight while the West watches and does "nothing".
Georgia has not backslid.
It has crossed a threshold.
1/19 By March 2026, Georgian Dream will have criminalized dissent, starved civil society, and banned independent election monitoring.
This is an 🇪🇺EU candidate country whose people march for Europe.
The democratic will exists.
The legal space to exercise it is being destroyed.
2/19

🇬🇪The OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism report on Georgia is out.
It is one of the most serious international assessments of the country’s democratic trajectory in years.
Here are the key findings policymakers should understand ⬇️
1/21 The report concludes that Georgia has undergone marked democratic backsliding since spring 2024.
2/21

🇬🇪🇬🇧Breaking: The “Political Council” of Georgian Dream has decided that when the UK sanctions two propaganda outlets, the appropriate response is an unhinged attack on its pro-Western political opponents.
1/9 Nothing screams “independent journalism” like a ruling party issuing theological manifestos about why its favorite TV channels are sacred vessels of truth.
2/9

🇬🇪Georgia has entered a new phase of political repression. A mass “Opposition Silencing Trial” is now underway in Tbilisi, targeting leading opposition figures in a single, collective prosecution that Georgian Dream brands as a “sabotage case.”
1/10 The so-called evidence reportedly consists of public speeches, protest activity and media appearances. In other words, lawful political activity reframed as a criminal conspiracy. Potential sentences reach 15 years.
2/10

🇬🇪Georgia is sliding into a legal dictatorship. Not overnight. Step by step. Each protest is met with a new tailored law.
Each law designed to exhaust, criminalize, and isolate society until resistance itself becomes illegal.
Here is how the latest law changes everything.
1/11 Step one: the so-called “Russian law.” Sold as transparency. In reality, a stigma law targeting civil society and media. Georgians protested in massive numbers. The government learned protest alone would not stop it.
2/11

🇬🇪Georgian Dream is Europe’s most un-democratic and human rights-violating force currently in power.
Today, they announced new amendments to the "Law on Grants" that criminalize receiving foreign support, restrict political participation, and outlaw core democratic activity
1/12
Georgian Dream is doing this for one simple reason: it works. Every previous authoritarian law has been met only with Western “concern,” “worry,” and polite “urges to reconsider.”
No consequences. No costs.
GD feel absolute power and they use it to crush all opposition.
2/12

🇬🇪Georgia and Georgian Dream is emerging as a key enabler of Russia’s sanctioned shadow fleet.
New reporting by Finland’s YLE reveals how Georgia-registered companies are keeping Russian oil tankers operational despite EU sanctions.
1/11 At the center is Arnika Trade LLC, a company registered in Tbilisi, identified as a key intermediary supplying spare parts for Finnish Wärtsilä engines used on Russian tankers under sanctions.
2/11

🇬🇪🇮🇷Georgia is strategically very important to the Iranian regime.
Not marginal. Not incidental.
Under Georgian Dream, Georgia has become a country Iran actively relies on to move money, goods, and political influence.
1/11 That importance did not emerge by accident. It grew as Georgian Dream steadily lowered political, diplomatic, and economic barriers between Tbilisi and Tehran, even as Iran faced deeper international isolation.
2/11

🇬🇪Georgia is no longer a democracy.
This is not “backsliding” or “under strain”.
It is an authoritarian system where power is, right now, being engineered to never change hands.
Calling it anything else is denial.
1/11
📷Maurizio Orlando / Hans Lucas Georgian Dream didn’t stumble into this.
They built it.
🔹Law by law
🔹Fine by fine
🔹Ban by ban
Repression that looks legal still counts as repression.
2/11
terjehelland1.substack.com/p/georgia-has-…

🇮🇷🇬🇪Over the past two years, Georgia’s ruling party Georgian Dream has quietly deepened ties with Iran. Not rhetorically. Practically. Through trade, business access, and political signaling that matters far more than speeches.
1/9 While Iran faces heavy international sanctions, Georgia has emerged as a low-friction gateway: company registrations, banking access, logistics, and regional transit. This is not accidental. It is policy enabled by political choice.
2/9