Georgian Vice PM: there is no opposition landscape in country, only an agent network seeking power

Mamuka Mdinaradze, Georgia’s Vice Prime Minister and State Minister for the Coordination of Law Enforcement Agencies, on Wednesday said there was no opposition in the country, but rather an “agent network” operating from different political camps and seeking to come to power by carrying out assigned instructions.

In his remarks, Mdinaradze noted that these “agents” have previously been in power and carried out instructions that had “tragic consequences”.

“Many of us have experienced these tragic consequences personally - through our family members, neighbours, relatives, and our country as a whole. If they return to power, the outcome will once again be a country governed by agents acting on instructions. We must not allow this to happen. A necessary condition for preventing it is recognising that we do not have a genuine opposition, but rather an agent network that receives instructions and channels funding into media outlets through those same structures”, he said.

“The funding sources of this agent network were cut off under the FARA law, and it is now even weaker. We carefully calculated these steps, which is why there was a two-year-long disinformation campaign against the so-called “Russian law” - what I described as the fraud of the century. They knew, just as we did, that the transparency law would sever the main funding channel of the agent network. That is why such hysteria was created”, Mdinaradze continued.

He added that what is commonly referred to as the opposition is, in reality, “a weakened agent network”.

“If we recognise that we are not dealing with an opposition but with an agent network - although we sometimes call it the opposition - we will make better decisions and draw the right conclusions”, Mdinaradze concluded.