Georgian Parliament Speaker: external forces use “silencing of discussion” as their key tool

Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Monday accused Brussels of suppressing public debate in Georgia, saying that the European Union was distancing itself from its founding values.

In his interview with Rustavi 2 TV channel, Papuashvili noted that the EU used its supporters in Georgia to “block debate” and replace it with political slogans.

“In reality, they made people hold up the flag of Europe and turned it into a country of slogans, the kind we left behind in the 1990s. Sometimes we ourselves, ironically, called our country a ‘country of slogans’ and looked at certain issues naively”, he said.

“In this way, they stripped their supporters of everything that is genuinely European, and that is exactly why the United States said in its national security strategy that the European Union today faces a civilizational crisis. They told them that nothing connects them anymore to the values on which the European Union was founded”, Papuashvili continued.

He further noted that Brussels had moved away from Christian values when they talked about false ideologies, claiming that a person could wake up and say that today they were one gender and tomorrow another.

“They have emptied democracy of meaning when minority governments prevail; and they have stripped away the main idea, which is peace - the EU’s principal unifying value. The European Union was created precisely for peace, yet today Brussels speaks only about war. War, frantic militarization - they have almost brought back Cold War terminology. Among other things, in Germany, mandatory conscription has once again been reinstated into law after several decades, and there are protests about it. They are stripping the European Union of exactly those values on which it is founded. This is precisely what the United States pointed out to the EU in that strategic document”, he concluded.