Georgia’s EU Ambitions at Stake as Controversial Bill Reintroduced

Then-Prime Minister of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, meeting with then-President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, in 2012 (Flickr).

Georgia’s ruling party, Georgian Dream, reintroduced a controversial “foreign agent” law on April 3 that it had abandoned last year following massive protests in Tbilisi, the capital. The 2023 version of the law required organizations receiving more than 20% of their funding from foreign sources to register as “agents of foreign influence,” allowing the government to have increased access to and power over them. The only change in the 2024 version is that organizations affected by the law are now called “organizations pursuing the interests of a foreign power.” The reintroduction of the foreign agent law represents a concerning pattern of potential backsliding on democracy and human rights in Georgia that threatens its ambitions to join the EU.

The Georgian opposition widely views Georgian Dream’s reintroduction of the law as a campaign strategy to consolidate support from Georgian conservatives ahead of the country’s parliamentary elections in October. Georgian Dream (GD) currently has an extremely narrow majority in Parliament, which the opposition claims GD is trying to protect by suppressing dissent. Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili accused the government of “sabotaging our path [to Europe] and our future” by reintroducing the law.

The opposition has called the proposed law the “Russian Law,” seeing it being modeled on Russia’s own foreign agent law, which has been in place since 2012. Russia has gradually tightened the law over the years, most recently by banning foreign agents from buying and selling ads in March in an attempt to deprive the opposition of its financing. Many Georgians worry the GD-led government, which has claimed civil society organizations are plotting revolution, would follow along the same path.

GD also introduced a bill seeking to prohibit “LGBT propaganda” on March 25, which would ban sex changes, adoption by same-sex couples, and gatherings aiming to popularize same-sex relationships, like the Tbilisi Pride Festival, if passed. The Georgian opposition has also compared this law to similar ones passed in Russia. Russia passed its first LGBT propaganda law in 2013, and has increased repressions against the LGBT community ever since. In November 2023, its Supreme Court declared the “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization, and in March it was also labeled as a terrorist organization. This has sparked fear among LGBT Russians, given the ongoing debate on whether Russia should reinstate the death penalty in cases of terrorism following the terrorist attack in Crocus City Hall, which killed 139 people.

Mamuka Mdinaradze, the head of GD’s parliamentary majority, who in 2023 said that a ban on LGBT propaganda was not being considered, directly repeated Russian rhetoric leading up to the introduction of Georgia’s LGBT propaganda law. On February 29, he claimed that the LGBT ideology would replace “mother” and “father” with “parent number one” and “parent number two.” Russian President Vladimir Putin made near-identical comments on “parent number one” and “parent number two” in a September 2022 speech.

Georgia is a majority Orthodox Christian country, influencing its conservative views on LGBT issues. For example, Tbilisi Pride has repeatedly faced violent attacks from anti-LGBT protestors. In 2023, organizers cancelled the event after anti-LGBT protestors clashed with police and burned pride flags outside the event. According to a 2021 study by Women’s Initiatives Supporting Group (WISG), 74.6% of Georgians oppose same-sex marriage and 53% agree that LGBT people should be legally prohibited from having the right to assemble and express themselves. This public sentiment helps explain the successful 2017 GD-led effort to amend the Georgian Constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, replacing the Constitution’s previously gender-neutral language. 
However, many Georgians and EU leaders worry that these proposed authoritarian laws will threaten Georgia’s path to EU membership. Georgia is currently an official candidate country to join the EU, and 79% of Georgians want to join the union. According to the 2021 WISG study, 61.2% of Georgians fully disagree, and 12.3% partially disagree that Georgia will have to legalize same-sex marriage to join the EU. EU leaders, however, have warned that human rights backsliding will hurt Georgia’s path to joining the union. Still, Georgia may be able to improve their membership prospects  by following Greece, an EU member that, on February 15, became the first Orthodox Christian-majority country to legalize same-sex marriage.