Chairman of the ruling Georgian Dream party Irakli Kobakhidze denounced the action of “radicals” and draws a parallel between these protests and the pro-European Maidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014. “Ukraine, in the end, lost 20% of its territory” after this revolution, he said, referring to the Ukrainian territories conquered by Moscow since the annexation of Crimea and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In a sign of growing concern in the West, the leader of European Union diplomacy, Josep Borrell, on Wednesday condemned the bill, deeming it “incompatible“with the values of the EU and the goal of joining the European bloc.
Georgian President Salome Zurabishvili has called for the law to be “repealed”, promising to veto it. This veto could however be overcome by the ruling party, Georgian Dream, which controls more than half of the seats in Parliament. According to Irakli Kobakhidze, the second and third reading of the text could however only take place in June, after the review of the bill by the Venice Commission, an advisory body of the Council of Europe.