Georgian Parliament official: coming months will Show whether Germany has truly changed its stance on Georgia

Levan Makhashvili, the Chair of the Georgian Parliament’s Committee on European Integration, on Tuesday said that the coming months would serve as a test to determine whether recent signals from Germany represent a genuine revision of its previous position toward Georgia or merely a change of diplomat.

In his interview with Imedi TV, Makashvili commented on the scheduling of Georgian Ambassador Aleksandre Kartozia’s credentials presentation to German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the removal from the German Federal Foreign Office’s website of a page identifying Salome Zourabichvili as Georgia’s incumbent president.

“The coming months will be a kind of test to assess whether this represents, in a way, a revision of Germany’s previous position or whether it is simply a change of diplomat. If we take the broader context into account, and consider the many signals indicating that there is a need to review both our bilateral relations and our relations with the European Union - including the many signals coming from the EU and Brussels in this regard - this context gives us positive expectations that we can reset our bilateral relations”, Makhashvili said.

The official said Georgia remained optimistic about the prospect of resetting bilateral relations, while stressing that any such progress would require deliberate efforts and would not occur automatically.

“This will not happen automatically. Just as we are seeing fierce resistance, both internally and externally, to our efforts to reset relations with the United States - with attempts to damage and obstruct this process as much as possible and create new obstacles on the path toward a positive dynamic in these relations - diplomacy is diplomacy precisely because, when there are political or other types of misunderstandings, we should be able to overcome them through diplomacy”, he stressed.

Makhashvili drew a parallel between the potential reset in Georgia-Germany relations and the Georgian Government’s efforts to restore ties with the United States, arguing that attempts had been made to hinder the emergence of a positive dynamic in both relationships.

“The geopolitical context gives us reason to expect that we will be able to reset these relations. Of course, Georgian-German relations do not exist in isolation. They are also part of a broader change in the overall context, and it is precisely within this context that we hope everything will move into a normal and constructive mode”, Makhashvili concluded.