Georgian Dream Selects New President, Cancels Christmas Tree Ceremony After Whining
12/14/24
By: Daniel Miller
As the snow settled in Tbilisi on Saturday morning, the Ministry of Interior Affairs (MIA) had already ordered another mobilization of special forces and a water cannon on Liberty Square, just 500 meters south of Parliament. Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri’s masked goons have committed hundreds of human rights violations, since November 28, traumatizing protesters, journalists, activists, and other party members with brutal gang beatings and traumatizing torture after blasting them with irritant-laced water and incapacitating them with tear gas. While angry and distraught mothers yelled at the masked cowards, forcing them to view the pictures of their beaten and kidnapped sons, the illegitimate Georgian Dream (GD) party was busy appointing an anti-Western puppet president as a replacement for Salome Zourabichvili, who promised not to leave her position until a new round of parliamentary elections are held.
Zourabichvili has been a vocal opponent of GD since assuming office in 2018. The GD-led parliament stripped most of the power away from the presidency the day she took office, and the current illegitimate government recently stripped away security protections once her term officially ends when they were previously guaranteed security for five years. This is the first year in which the president was selected by parliament through an electoral college vote. All 75 opposition members abstained from voting just as they have abstained from participating in the current legislative section to avoid lending GD any kind of legitimacy.
The day was supposed to have been a special day for the Georgian Dream, a party scrambling for any kind of recognition from a Western world leader besides the bloated and predictable Hungarian Prime Minister. Not only was the presidential appointment on the schedule but the traditional lighting of the Christmas tree was supposed to have happened that evening at 19:00. Days earlier, Tbilisi Mayor Kakha Kaladze, who is also a member of GD, had a “protective” barrier installed around the giant Christmas tree that sits in front of Parliament to protect it from the protesters who kept adorning it with disturbing pictures of those the regime have brutalized. Kaladze called on families to bring their children for the tree lighting, but postponed it when the time came, blaming the protesters for “organizing provocations, aggression, and throwing bottles towards the tree.”
“We will hold it when the radical opposition stops blocking children and allows them to enjoy the tree,” he added.
This move further angered those who bothered to show up. “Why did you bring us here?” said one woman. “We’re freezing to death.”
Prominent members of the party, including Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, have resorted to playing the victim and promoting anti-Western conspiracy theories to explain why tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets for over two weeks. They have arrested opposition leaders, accusing them of organizing the protests and promoting violence after allegedly confiscating eggs, pyrotechnics, and gas masks from their respective party’s headquarters. They have blamed NGOs and foreigners for organizing the protests and provoking the authorities, relying heavily on misinformation derived from a quote by Mamuka Mdinaradze, the executive secretary of the ruling Georgian Dream party, who claimed that 30% of protesters detained were foreign nationals. While that is a peculiar statistic, it makes sense that most of them turned out to be Russian citizens.
Harsher sanctions are needed by the collective West against top members of GD, including its oligarchic boss Bidzina Ivanishvili, to pressure them into holding new parliamentary elections that are monitored by international observers. The protests show no signs of abating and appear to be just as strong as on November 26th. The Georgian people will undoubtedly do what is necessary on their end to effectuate a new round of elections; it’s up to the Western powers to do whatever is necessary to help the people of Georgia before an entire generation is yet again lost to the repressive rule of its northern neighbor.
