15 July 2024
Top officials from Georgia’s ruling Georgian Dream party have claimed that the ‘Global War Party’, a supposed shadowy group of international elites seeking to involve Georgia in war, was responsible for Saturday’s attack on former US president Donald Trump.
Trump was shot on Saturday evening while addressing supporters in Pennsylvania as part of his pre-election campaign. Trump was lightly wounded, while one rally attendee and the attacker were killed.
While Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze’s English-language statement on X made no mention of the conspiracy, expressing his shock and asserting that ‘violence has no place in politics’, his Georgian-language post on Facebook stated that ‘the Global War Party does not change [its] methods’.
‘In the 21st century, liberal fascism, radicalism, polarisation, hatred and bloody attacks on politicians have become commonplace in America and Europe’, he added.
Members of the ruling Georgian Dream Party have in recent months increasingly frequently claimed that a secret cabal, the Global War Party, is controlling the West and attempting to sow war globally. In public speeches, including at a government rally in April, the party’s leaders and billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili have alleged that it is seeking to push Georgia to open a ‘second front’ of war against Russia.
[Read more: Ivanishvili touts conspiracy theories at massive pro-government rally in Tbilisi]
In a post around an hour earlier, parliamentary majority leader Mamuka Mdinaradze made similar claims, calling the incident ‘shocking, outrageous and alarming’.
‘Political violence and assassination attempts, subversive actions and propaganda of lies, war, and destruction are signatures of the Global War Party and liberal fascism’, he wrote. ‘And [yet] in Georgia, the parties [working on the behalf of foreign secret services] claim there is no Global War Party, Georgian Dream invented it…’
A week earlier, Mdinaradze suggested that the West had deliberately bankrupted Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse to apply pressure to party founder and billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, and put forward that the Global War Party was behind the actions.
‘As for the Global War Party, these are specific, unfortunately, very influential forces that manage, for example, to organise an attempt to blackmail Bidzina Ivanishvili at the expense and cost of the bankruptcy of a Swiss bank and to stop billions’, he said adding that he was ‘talking about specific forces that control the situation and influence [...] structures that are capable of making decisions all over the world’.
[Read more: Top Georgian official suggests West bankrupted Credit Suisse to blackmail Ivanishvili]
While Georgian Dream officials have consistently refused to directly identify who or what they consider to be involved in the Global War Party, they frequently imply that the US and European Union are acting in its interests, while also suggesting that Russia’s attacks on Georgia and Ukraine were driven by the Party.
‘Agents and useful idiots’
Georgian Dream MPs echoed the comments of the party’s leaders, with MP Irakli Zarkua on Sunday telling journalists that ‘an attack on the future president of the USA is another clear expression of the Global War Party, how it attacks its opponents […] [and] people with different opinions or ideologies’.
‘Unfortunately, during the period of this [American] government, the USA, as a beacon of democracy, was buried. I'm sorry to say that. You were an example for all of us. What did you turn this country into?’ he said.
Parliamentary majority member and deputy chair of the Defence and Security Committee Tengiz Sharmanashvili shared the prime minister’s post, and suggested that the attack bolstered Kobakhidze’s earlier claims that an EU official had threatened him with assassination.
[Read more: Georgian security chief says there is ‘insufficient evidence’ of plot on PM’s life]
In May, Irakli Kobakhidze accused an unidentified EU Commissioner of threatening that he would share the fate of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, who had recently been attacked at the time, also suggesting that Western countries were behind the assassination attempt. Sharmanshvili added that ‘agents and useful idiots’ would soon start justifying the attack on Trump.
