CEPS Doubts Georgia’s Readiness for EU Membership Application in Released Analysis
By Liza Mchedlidze
Monday, May 23, 2022
Center for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels published an analysis of Georgia's application for EU membership submitted on March 3, 2022, following Ukraine and Moldova. CEPS refers to Georgia’s political standpoint as a ‘paradox’.
CEPS article reads that Georgia has suppressed Ukraine and Moldova and some other candidate states in the implementation of economic parts of the Association Agreement (AA) and Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area (DCFTA) with the European Union, calling it ‘impressive’.
Analysis reads that Georgia’s current political regime has been contradicting the EU’s fundamental values of democracy and the supremacy of law, stating that the main problem is ‘ the concentration of effective political power in the hands of an unelected, unaccountable oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, embodying the paradigm of state capture.’
CEPS also recalls the 2018 elections, when Ivanishvili ‘was responsible for the most egregious case of vote-buying in the second round, paying off bank debts of a considerable part of the population.”
Center for European Policy Studies wrote about the heavily criticized arrest and imprisonment of opposition leader Nika Melia and the Media personality Nika Gvaramia:
“A further troubling feature of the political regime has been its interference in high-level court judgments concerning opposition politicians and leading media personalities. There have been recurrent cases of ‘politicised justice’, criticised widely by Georgia’s international partners and civil society.
The latest instance occurred on 16 May, when a court handed down a judgment and sentence of over three and a half years of imprisonment to Nika Gvaramia, director of TV Mtavari, a channel often critical of the government. The judgment’s timing came only weeks after submitting Georgia’s application for EU membership, and around three weeks before the European Commission is expected to deliver its Opinion on the application.
“One would have expected the historic decision to apply for EU membership to have been accompanied by signals that Georgia was now resolutely set upon reforming political and judicial practices in line with the highest European standards. Instead, the only observable news is the Gvaramia case, which even appears as an act of provocation that signals the government’s apparent inclination to become a troublemaking Member State.”
CEPS assesses the Gvaramia arrest as “One could hardly have imagined a more damaging step to take at this stage.”
All these taken into account, CEPS believes that the ‘government of Bidzina Ivanishvili’ applied to EU membership to satisfy the majority of public opinion who want a European future for Georgia, calling this move a ‘superficial tactic’:
“The external observer struggles to understand what the government and Mr. Ivanishvili intended. Seeking a rationale, the membership application can be viewed as a symbolic and superficial tactic to try to satisfy the large majority of Georgian public opinion that wants a European future. At the same time, the leadership seems to have no interest in making a success of the accession process and is proceeding in ways that would precipitate its failure.”
The analysis reads that Georgia’s readiness for EU accession now is ‘premature’ and is mainly dependent on several factors including a new and more propitious political environment, genuine democratic culture, and independent judiciary in Georgia.
