Pro-government commentator appointed as advisor to controversial Georgian President Kavelashvili

Luka Ekhvaia, a pro-government commentator, has been appointed as an adviser on international relations to Georgia’s disputed President Mikheil Kavelashvili. Ekhvaia has been known for his praise of Georgian Dream policies and advocacy for deeper Georgia–China relations as a counterbalance to the West.

The news agency BMG was the first to report on Ekhvaia’s role in Kavelashvili’s administration. According to the agency, the disputed president has only one adviser — Ekhvaia — whose monthly salary exceeds ₾6,400 ($2,300), as revealed by a public information request.

OC Media confirmed Ekhvaia’s appointment with the presidential administration press office.

According to public sources, Ekhvaia is a senior research fellow at the Centre for International Policy Research  and Forecasting (CIPRF), which, according to its website, was founded in Tbilisi in 2020. The center described itself as a scientific research organisation ‘dedicated to the study of current socio-political processes’.

Some users of Georgian social media first became acquainted with Kavelashvili’s adviser from a TikTok page called Fucos Kankara (Foucault’s Pendulum), where he, along with several others, began posting videos discussing Georgian and world politics. The account’s YouTube channel claimed that it would reveal the reality ‘hidden by all sides’ to its audience.

In his public activities, Ekhvaia repeatedly expressed his support for Georgia’s partnership with China, calling the US ‘the biggest empire of the modern world and a declining hegemonic power’ while referring to Xi Jinping as ‘the most influential figure of the new world order’, who has 'transformed China, long demeaned by the West, into a superpower’.

Ekhvaia’s rhetoric on China aligned with the ruling party’s course — at the end of 2023, Georgia signed a strategic partnership agreement with China. Since then, the ties have deepened as relations with the West have continued to deteriorate.

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At the end of November last year, Ekhvaia congratulated ‘real Georgians’ on the US suspension of its strategic partnership with Georgia, stating that it was ‘a significant step toward decolonisation and independence’.

Since the spring of 2024, when Georgian Dream attempted and passed the controversial foreign agent law amid protests, Ekhvaia appeared on pro-government TV channels and their websites, commenting on politics and criticising the opposition and civil society.

During the protests that accompanied Georgian Dream’s suspension of the EU membership bid, Ekhvaia spoke of an ‘organised attack on our statehood’, while referring to those who entered the public broadcaster’s building demanding the airtime as ‘Nazi NGO sect’.

‘They have only one mission: to organise a foreign-orchestrated coup, complete destabilisation, and drag the country into war’, wrote Ekhvaia at the time, echoing the rhetoric of the ruling party, which repeatedly claimed that its critics were trying to drag Georgia into a war with Russia.

In January, during continuing protests, Ekhvaia stated that the ruling party should consolidate power to protect the dignity of public officials and judges ‘from the liberal jihad and the psychological terror of minorities’.

On Friday, Ekhvaia criticised the media coverage of his appointment, as well as the way some outlets described his political views, stating that ‘it is difficult to describe a person and identify their worldview when you lack intellectual autonomy’.

This month, Ekhvaia also joined X, where he posts in English about China, U.S. foreign policy, and Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine.

In one instance, he shared a post about a statement by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who described the war in Ukraine as a ‘proxy war’ between the US and Russia. Ekhvaia interpreted the comment statement as an ‘acknowledgement’ that the war in Ukraine was ‘provoked by NATO’.

Who is Mikheil Kavelashvili

Georgia’s disputed President Kavelashvili was sworn in December 2024. He became the first president in Georgia’s history to be elected by an electoral college rather than by popular vote.

The vote has been widely dismissed by local stakeholders as illegitimate, along with the new iteration of parliament, which was formed as a result of the controversial parliamentary elections held two months earlier, marked by widespread incidents of vote buying and breaches of voter secrecy.

A former footballer, Kavelashvili entered politics as an MP for Georgian Dream in 2016 and was among those with the sharpest words for Georgia’s Western partners over their criticism of the ruling party’s anti-democratic steps and lack of institutional reforms. Kavelashvili  was also among the authors of Georgia’s foreign agent law.

In 2022, Kavelashvili formally departed Georgian Dream to co-found the People’s Power party. While continuing to express support to the ruling party, the group pledged to voice more explicit opposition to the West than Georgian Dream itself, which at the time appeared cautious about alienating its pro-Western base.

Kavelashvili’s inaugural speech echoed the ruling party’s election campaign rhetoric, emphasising ‘sovereignty’ in the face of pressure from Western powers and cautioning voters about the risk of war with Russia if the party were not reelected.

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