Political parties of Georgia not always a household name

There are more than 200 political parties in Georgia that are registered at the Ministry of Justice. The most popular names like Democrats, Republicans, Labourists or Nationals are occupied… the major difficultly for the new parties are selecting names.

Creating space for a multi-party system is a part of democracy. Georgia is trying to be among the democratic states. There are very few examples in Georgia when political parties successfully unite in coalition; one of the exceptions is the Georgian Dream. However, very often there are cases of the creation of one-man parties. These are the political entities that were created mainly by single prominent political figures who decided to leave a political group where he/she had some problems. After quitting the organization he/she established a political party in order to stay in politics.

Currently, 18 “leading parties” receive 150, 000 GEL each from the state budget. However, many of these political organizations are hardly known at all to the population. The “tradition” of allocating state money to political entities has resulted in some criticism from those who disagree with the spending of money on so many political organizations. They think that it would be better if the state stops allocating money for political entities and instead let them receive financing from sponsors or supporters. So, the analysts recommend the state create a new scheme for supporting the political entities. The analysts claim that on the one hand the new model will demonstrate how popular a certain party is and on the other hand, the monetary burden will be removed from the state budget.