Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party pulls out from the Party of European Socialists (PES) where it had observer member status since 2015. PES was planning to reevaluate cooperation with the ruling party next month.
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Following today’s session of the Political Council, the chairman of Georgian Dream, Irakli Kobakhidze, touched on the reasons behind this decision. According to him, statements from the leaders of PES regarding the participation of Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili in the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary are unacceptable to them.
“Our party’s participation in the said conference on the highest political level and the Prime Minister’s speech was an expression of our commitment and firm support to universal traditional values. We firmly believe that the progress and success of any country need a solid base of fundamental values. Therefore, each of us needs to seriously think about the value crisis that permeates the modern world and which pseudo-liberals are deliberately fueling. Our involvement in the conference was negatively assessed by the leaders of the European party, of which Georgian Dream is an observing member. Moreover, they voiced a public threat of sorts regarding the reevaluation of the partnership, which was not preceded by any two-way dialogue. Such conduct and attitude from the Party of European Socialists are unacceptable to us,” stated Kobakhidze.
Georgian Dream also bemoans the lack of support from the European party. As stated by Kobakhidze, PES has never made any loud statements in support of the Georgian Dream since 2015.
“Moreover, individual representatives of the party have regularly joined in on the political campaigns of radical opposition.
Last year, several dozen EU parliamentarians from the Party of European Socialists joined in on nonsensical resolutions, which demanded sanctions against our party’s founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, the release of two criminals – Mikheil Saakashvili and Nika Gvaramia, and cessation of criminal prosecution of yet another criminal – David Kezerashvili.
Unfortunately, the Party of European Socialists has never denounced the support of these absurd resolutions by their members. In light of these circumstances, not only did the membership of the Georgian Dream in the Party not play a supportive role on Georgia’s path to European integration, but on the contrary - was completely counterproductive”.
According to Irakli Kobakhidze, the ideology of the Party of European Socialists is also unacceptable for the Georgian Dream. The chairman of the ruling party of Georgia said that in recent years, PES was “increasingly moving away from the classic social-democratic ideology towards pseudo-liberalism, which exacerbates the value crisis in the modern world.”
“Such ideological transformation is unacceptable to us and incompatible with our, as well as Georgian society’s views and values.
Based on all the above, we have decided to retract our status as the observer of the Party of European Socialists and all other unions related to the party. From now on, Georgian Dream will cooperate with every European political party on equal terms to achieve the foreign political goals set by our country, society, and government,” said Kobakhidze.
The organizer of the annual conference referred to by Irakli Kobakhidze is the American organization Conservative Political Action Coalition. Hungary hosted the event for the second time this year, and one of the main speakers was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has been widely criticized for his pro-Russian stance and homophobic policy within the European Union.
Irakli Gharibashvili spoke at the conference on May 4 with homophobic implications. According to him, there are bad actors who are trying to achieve their agenda by “destroying traditional, family values and propagating false freedom, LGBT propaganda, trying to legalize sex change for minors bypassing their parents, and forcing such so-called progressive changes, which will estrange a person from his roots, family, tradition, culture, and history.” Gharibashvili said that his government will not allow “the abuse of the majority by the minority” and will not condone “the attempt of the minority to force-change values with aggressive propaganda.”
On April 28, after it became known that the Prime Minister of Georgia was going to participate in the conference, the leaders of PES announced that they were going to review the status of the Georgian Dream in June. As it turned out, this issue was raised by the president of PES, the former Prime Minister of Sweden - Stefan Löfven, back in March, when Georgian Dream supported the enactment of the so-called Law on Foreign Agents.
