On Friday evening, thousands of Georgians took to the streets across the capital Tbilisi to mark the one-year anniversary of the government’s EU U-turn — one year since daily anti-government protests began in response.
On the 366th day of non-stop demonstrations, protesters marched down from several streets to join a large procession towards parliament, the traditional site of anti-government actions.
‘Till the end!’, was the slogan heard often, emphasising the movement’s steadfastness.
‘Our country doesn’t deserve this. Our place is unquestionably in Europe’, Sopo Alavidze, a 39 year-old public health specialist told OC Media at the demonstration.
Alavidze was one of the thousands who spontaneously took to the streets on the evening of 28 November 2024, the day Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze announced live on air that the government had halted Georgia’s application for EU membership ‘until the end of 2028’.
For many, this was the final confirmation that Georgian Dream — which had already sharply hardened its rhetoric toward the country’s traditional Western partners and intensified pressure on domestic critics — was definitively abandoning its declared European aspirations.
The massive protests in Tbilisi were accompanied by smaller — but significant — demonstrations across the country. Since then, despite shrinking in size over the course of the year, protests have taken on a stubborn character, with protesters unwilling to cede even a single day to the government.
‘It’s hard even to imagine that my children might inherit the same Georgia we have now and might have to go through what we’ve had to endure all this time’, Alavidze says. While she cannot attend the Tbilisi protests every day, she still tries to join several times a month.
‘[The slogan] “till the end” means until victory, until the government changes’, Alavidze adds.
Over the past year, the ruling party has repeatedly tried to suppress the protests — first through police violence and dozens of arrests, then through a series of restrictive laws, heavy fines, and administrative detentions.
Yet protests are only one of the targets: the government has also gone after civil society, independent media, and the political opposition. What many critics describe as the consolidation of authoritarianism has accelerated.
‘Little by little, it became clear […] that we had even more reasons to be angry’, activist Tatia Dvali tells OC Media. Dvali is a member of the left-leaning Movement for Social Democracy, which was born alongside the protest movement.
At the start of the demonstrations, several members of the movement organised separate marches demanding fair coverage of critical voices by Georgia’s Public Broadcaster (GPB). They continued to hold daily marches from the GPB building to parliament until recently, an action now known among protesters as the ‘GPB march’.
‘In the challenges we face today, we also see what Georgian Dream intends for the country’s future’, Dvali adds. ‘For example, the possibility of receiving a proper education in the country could disappear, there could be no media outlets left to speak the truth, normal working conditions could vanish, and not a single natural area might remain unprivatised’.
Since its inception, the protest movement has been diverse, bringing together groups and individuals who differ politically, socially and ideologically.
In Dvali’s view, the desire to move closer to the EU — the derailment of which brought different segments of society to the streets — ‘primarily stems from the fact that the most basic social needs in the country remain unmet’.
‘Even if I personally hold the greatest criticism of the EU itself, the needs that led the Georgian public to want to be part of the EU represent the most basic minimum — something they assumed could only be met by being in the European Union’, she says.
‘The first word that comes to mind is “survival” ’
At the start of the protests, tens of thousands of people joined daily, but over time, under state pressure, exhaustion, and growing despair, the numbers have dwindled.
Yet still, groups of protesters continue to gather outside the parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue every day, making the movement apparently the longest-running anti-government protest in the capital since Georgia’s independence from the Soviet Union.
Graphic designer and illustrator Dato Simonia is one of those who has remained involved in the street protests. In response to government attempts to discredit the demonstrators as ‘radicals’ and ‘paid agents’, he runs a social media series called ‘Who stands on Rustaveli’, creating illustrations of protesters and sharing their stories with his audience.
‘When I think about this past year, the first word that comes to mind is “survival” — not just physical survival, but also moral and ethical’, he tells OC Media.
Long-term protest is not something new to Simonia: before the government’s EU U-turn, he was assisting residents of the western Martvili Municipality, who since 2023 have tried to resist the privatisation and construction project in Balda Canyon — a largely untouched natural area.
For Simonia, the protests in Tbilisi and Martvili are similar both in how ‘people fight’ and in how ‘power fights back against the people’.
‘I think that here [in Tbilisi] not only the fate of the country as a whole is being decided, but also the fate of specific canyons, forests, and valleys. If the moral backbone here is broken, the first thing the wave of repression will hit is the regions — and it will be even more ruthless there’, Simonia says.
‘Our strength comes from our children behind bars’
Many of those who joined the rallies in the initial days are now following the protests from prison cells. During the very first stage of the protests and accompanying clashes with police, dozens of demonstrators were arrested on criminal charges — the courts later sentenced many to long prison terms. Government critics have insisted the cases are politically motivated, lacking sufficient evidence.
One of those sentenced is 20 year-old student activist Zviad Tsetskhladze from the southwest Adjara region. Tsetskhladze was detained in December; he was later sentenced to two and a half years in prison on charges of ‘organising group actions that violate public order’.
‘The strength of the prisoners’ families comes from our children behind bars. They remain steadfast there, and through this, they give us both energy and strength’, Tsetskhladze’s father, Zurab Tsetskhladze, told OC Media at Friday’s protest.
Together with his wife, Nargiz Davitadze, he continues to participate in the protests, often wearing a T-shirt featuring his son’s photo.
‘Without our uncompromising stance, we would have completely fallen apart in this unequal struggle’, he adds.
According to Tsetskhladze, on one side today are ‘justice, the people, and the country’s European and national future’, while on the other side is the ‘Russian regime’ — a phrase critics often use to describe the ruling party, arguing that Georgian Dream is steering the country into Russia’s orbit.
For Tsetskhladze, who himself recently spent seven days in prison on charges of blocking the road at a protest, the size of Friday’s rally was proof that ‘the protest has not disappeared anywhere’.
‘We went through this entire cycle, we fought, we struggled, we ended up in prisons, we faced many problems, but we endured’, he says.
Amidst increasing state pressure — including new restrictive laws and arrests — the protest movement has repeatedly had to adapt its methods. This has sparked ongoing discussions about the movement’s future, the prospects for change, and the effectiveness of its current strategies.
Meanwhile, the movement has moved into its second year of continuous action.
‘I understand everyone who feels frustrated […]’, Dvali says, summing up:
‘If we agree that injustice and the Georgian Dream’s power are vast and total, it is equally clear that this cannot be changed in a single day’.
Mariam Nikuradze
