The EU has issued a damning assessment of Georgia’s EU accession progress, calling Geogia a ‘candidate country in name only’.
Presenting the European Commission’s 2025 enlargement report on Tuesday, EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos addressed the Georgian government directly. ‘You are not bringing your people to the EU, you’re bringing your people away from the EU. If you are serious about the EU, then listen to your people and stop putting the opposition leaders, and journalists, and people who think differently than you in jail — then we can talk’, she said.
While Georgia’s EU accession process has been de facto on hold since November 2024, Tuesday’s report said that ‘since then, the situation has sharply deteriorated’.
Georgia was granted EU candidate status in December 2023, having applied alongside Ukraine and Moldova following Russia’s fullscale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In the following years, the ruling Georgian Dream party has cracked down on civil society.
Following the party’s victory in the flawed parliamentary elections in 2024, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced Georgia was suspending its accession efforts until 2028. The decision sparked daily protests that remain ongoing.
According to the EU’s enlargement report, over the past year, Georgia has seen ‘serious democratic backsliding marked by a rapid erosion of the rule of law and severe restrictions on fundamental rights’,
‘This includes legislation severely limiting civic space, undermining freedom of expression and assembly, and violating the principle of non-discrimination’.
Out of all 10 countries considered in the report, Georgia was singled out for the harshest criticism, with Serbia following behind. Although the report acknowledged that ‘accession negotiations with Turkey remain at a standstill since 2018’, some positive developments were still noted.
Beyond domestic issues, the report also criticised the state of Georgia’s relations with the EU, saying ‘Georgian authorities systematically engaged in unprecedented, hostile anti-EU rhetoric, often echoing Russian-style disinformation’.
In the summary of its 90-page report on the current status of Georgia’s progress, the commission said that previous recommendations for reforms from both 2023 and 2024 had not been addressed, as well as subsequent issues that have arisen since then.
There were a few bright spots identified in the report, namely economic criteria and the green agenda, although in both cases, the commission found that Georgia had made only ‘some progress’ or ‘limited progress’ since the previous year.
The chair of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, dismissed the report on Tuesday evening. He said it ‘blends tired political accusations, lies, hostile rhetoric and deliberate malice’, and reflected a distorted view of the country ‘from a Brussels office’ rather than the real situation on the ground.
He went on to accuse the EU of plotting a coup in Georgia, of ‘financing radicalism and disinformation’, and of attempting to ‘bring the Georgian government under ideological and political diktat’.
He said that Brussels was ‘clearly moving away from Europe and European values’ and becoming ‘an ideologised bureaucratic machine that tries to silence critics and cancel opponents, considering any means acceptable to achieve this aim.’
Despite this, he insisted that Georgia would continue to pursue EU membership, ‘not for the Europe that Brussels’ current bureaucracy is emptying of European substance and leaving a mere union, but for the Europe that aims to restore European values’.
He concluded by stating there was a ‘real awakening in Europe’ and that countries were choosing governments that would ‘return the EU to a system of real values’.
‘We clearly see how Georgia’s future trajectory is merging with a path of development based on the EU’s proper values’, he said.
OC Media
