EU Parliament calls for sanctions against Ivanishvili and others, and non-recognition of Georgian Dream government

The EU Parliament has adopted a resolution critical of the ruling Georgian Dream party, calling on the EU Council and states to impose sanctions on  Bidzina Ivanishvili, the billionaire founder of Georgian Dream, and an extensive list of other officials, as well as to recognise the government as illegitimate.

The resolution was adopted on Thursday, with 400 MEPs voting in favour of it, 63 against, and 81 abstaining.

The resolution also calls Georgia a ‘state captured by illegitimate Georgian Dream regime’ and demands new elections in the country overseen by an ‘independent and impartial election administration’.

The EU Parliament has called for the release of those detained during the pro-EU protests that have been raging in Georgia since November 2024, as well as the release of Batumelebi and Netgazeti founder Mzia Amaghlobeli.

Amaghlobeli was arrested in mid-January on charges of slapping Batumi police chief Irakli Dgebuadze and has been on hunger strike in protest against her detention since.

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The resolution called for ‘immediate and targeted personal sanctions on Ivanishvili, his family, and his companies, and to freeze all his assets within the EU for his role in the deterioration of the political process in Georgia, enabling democratic backsliding and acting against the country’s constitutionally declared interests of Euro-Atlantic integration’.

The resolution singles out his four children — Uta, Bera, Gvantsa, and Tsotne Ivanishvili — and his wife, Ekaterna Khvedelidze, as individuals the EU must sanction. It also called for sanctions against his brother Aleksandre Ivanishvili, his cousin Ucha Mamatsashvili, and his nephew Shmagi Kobakhidze.

The MEPs additionally called for sanctions on Ivanishvili’s network of ‘enablers, elite entourage, corrupt financial operatives, propagandists, and those facilitating the repressive state apparatus, including the president of National Bank of Georgia Natia Turnava, the Head of Autonomous Government of Adjara Tornike Rizhvadze, judges Mikheil Chinchaladze and Levan Murusidze, head of the State Security Service Grigol Liluashvili, and several businesspeople and media managers’.

The EU Parliament has also demanded the imposition of sanctions against Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, General Secretary of Georgian Dream and Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze, Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili, Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri, and party chair and former Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili.

In addition, the resolution also reiterated its call on the EU Commission and Council to review the visa liberalisation act with Georgia, ‘with the  possibility of suspension if it is considered that EU standards on democratic governance and freedoms are not being upheld’.

The EU Parliament previously called for sanctions against Ivanishvili in another resolution in April 2024 as Georgian Dream prepared to adopt the controversial foreign agent law that is likened by critics to Russian legislation used to stifle dissent and crush civil society in Russia.

EU Parliament calls for sanctions against Bidzina Ivanishvili

The EU Parliament has adopted a scathing condemnation of Georgian Dream’s foreign agent draft law, calling for the sanctioning of the party’s founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, and hinging Georgia’s accession talks with the abortion of the draft law. The European Parliament approved the resolution with…

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At the time, the EU Parliament called on the EU Commission to ‘promptly assess’ the impact of the foreign agent law on Georgia’s fulfilment of the fundamental rights visa liberalisation benchmark — one of the four benchmarks Georgia had to fulfil before being granted EU visa liberalisation in 2017.

The April 2024 resolution did not call for sanctions against other Georgian nationals.

‘The Deep State will destroy the EU’

Georgian Dream immediately criticised the resolution after its adoption, issuing a statement accusing the EU Parliament of being under the influence of the ‘Deep State’ — a term frequently used to describe groups made up of different organisations or agencies that secretly manipulate governments.

The term settled in Georgian Dream’s dictionary relatively recently, with the party in December 2024 specifically casting blame on the ‘Deep State’ for the unrest and wars that have occurred worldwide in the past few years.

‘[In] response to the resolution adopted today, we would like to declare that either the “Deep State” will destroy the European Union, or the European Union will find the strength to somehow escape the influence of the “Deep State”’.

‘In our opinion, unfortunately, it is absolutely impossible to take the European Parliament seriously today’, the statement concluded.

On Wednesday, a day before the resolution was adopted, Kobakhidze dismissed the draft of the resolution as being meaningless, ‘like previous resolutions’.

‘The reality is that in Georgia the country is governed democratically, the opposition is anti-democratic by its very nature, although you see that the resolutions of the European Parliament sometimes reflect support for the radical opposition, radicalism and everything that the new administration of the USA is so clearly criticising today. Taking all this into account, the resolution of the European Parliament has absolutely nothing, due to its unjust nature and content’.

The imposition of individual EU sanctions requires the consent of all member states. Given their close ties to Georgian Dream and past action to block EU sanctions, it is likely that Hungary and Slovakia will continue to obstruct any future measures.

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The resolution comes as Georgians throughout the country continue to protest Georgian Dream’s policies and the results of the October 2024 parliamentary elections, which gave the ruling party a large majority with 54% of the vote.

The political crisis in the country deepened when Kobakhidze announced in late November that the government was halting Georgia’s EU bid until 2028, sparking daily mass protests during which more than 400 demonstrators were reported to have been detained thus far.

Since the protests began, law enforcement officers and unidentified masked people have assaulted a number of protesters, including tens of journalists covering the protests.

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