On 9 May, Georgia joins the rest of Europe in marking Europe Day – a moment that this year carries particular weight given the state of the country's tense relations with the European Union. To examine the current impasse, its underlying causes, and the prospects for a path forward, this interview draws on the insights of Dr. George Robakidze, a former diplomat and Brussels-based expert in international politics, European integration, and security affairs, who has held senior positions within the Georgian public service and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over a career spanning nearly three decades and currently serves as Executive Director of the EU Awareness Centre.

Georgia signed an Association Agreement with the EU in 2014, achieved visa liberalization in 2017, and was formally granted candidate status in 2023. Yet accession talks have effectively been frozen since mid-2024; essentially, the Georgian government itself suspended the integration process until 2028. How did relations reach this historic low point? Who bears the greater responsibility for the breakdown? And is there still a realistic path forward?

To better understand the full extent of the decline in EU-Georgia relations and where we are today, it helps to remember that just a decade ago, Georgia was one of the EU's most successful reform stories, not only in the South Caucasus but in the broader eastern European neighborhood. 

In 2023, Georgia received EU candidate status, but with conditions attached. Those conditions reflected a specific reform agenda that the authorities were expected to fulfill. What happened instead was a systematic reversal. The inflection point came in May 2024, when the Georgian Dream government reintroduced and passed its so-called "foreign influence" law – modelled explicitly on Russian legislation used to suppress civil society. 

The EU's response was measured but unambiguous. The European Council concluded at its June 2024 summit that the law represented democratic backsliding amounting to a de facto halt of the accession process. By July, EU Ambassador Herczyński confirmed formally that Georgia's accession process was "stopped for now." The Commission simultaneously withheld and reallocated €121.3 million in assistance and froze €30 million from the European Peace Facility.

Then came the contested October 2024 parliamentary elections, and on 28 November 2024, Prime Minister Kobakhidze formally announced that Georgia would not put EU accession on the agenda until 2028 and would refuse all EU budgetary grants in the same period. 

The proximate cause is unambiguously Georgian Dream and more specifically its de facto leader, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who has systematically steered the party away from Euro-Atlantic integration since at least 2022. The foreign agents law, the rigged elections, the crackdown on protesters, the imprisonment of opposition leaders, the suspension of accession talks: these are choices that do not reflect the preferences of Georgian society as a whole.

On the other side, the EU was slow to develop effective counter-messaging against Georgian Dream's increasingly sophisticated disinformation campaign. Its application of conditionality was inconsistent – financial assistance continued for months after accession talks were halted, which diluted the deterrent signal. And within the EU itself, positions were far from unified.

As for the path forward, it is narrow, but it exists. I envision two plausible scenarios. The first one involves Georgian Dream making a course correction under the combined pressure of economic deterioration, escalating EU measures (which are now more feasible after Orbán's blocking power has been removed), and sustained civic protest. The second scenario comprises political change in Georgia through elections or a civic movement capable of fracturing or displacing Georgian Dream. If none of these scenarios come true, then Georgia will face what I would call the dark scenario: continued authoritarian consolidation, with Georgia missing the EU enlargement window of opportunity and drifting into a Turkey-like limbo of nominal candidate status with no credible accession horizon. That remains, unfortunately, the most realistic and probable trajectory in the near term if the domestic and geopolitical environment does not shift.

The EU has limited financial assistance, halted accession track, revoked visa facilitation for Georgian diplomats, and imposed targeted sanctions, but Georgian Dream has not reversed course on democratic backsliding or prioritized implementing the reform initiatives required for accession negotiations to potentially open. Has EU conditionality failed in Georgia's case, and if so, what active leverage does Brussels practically have left?

Conditionality has failed to produce behavioral change so far, but I would argue against the conclusion that it has been exhausted. What has failed is the specific configuration of measures deployed: the sequencing was too slow, financial penalties came after the wrongdoings rather than preventing them, and the most targeted instrument – individual sanctions against Ivanishvili and key officials was repeatedly blocked at the Council level.

The measures taken till now include the withholding and reallocation of financial assistance, the suspension of high-level political meetings, the partial suspension of visa facilitation for diplomatic and service passport holders in January 2025, and the redirection of civil society funding away from government-linked channels toward independent organizations and media. But Georgian Dream, under Ivanishvili's direction, appears to have calculated that the costs of Western estrangement are manageable, particularly given Russian and Chinese economic alternatives and the reduced pressure from Washington under the second Trump administration.

What leverage remains? The most consequential and most debated option is the suspension of visa-free travel for all Georgian citizens, not merely diplomatic passport holders. Crucially, this requires only a qualified majority, not unanimity, so it cannot be vetoed by a single member state. Commissioner Kos acknowledged already in April 2025 that this was under active consideration, though this step raises a lot of concerns, since it penalizes ordinary Georgians who support EU integration.

Another possible step could be a review or partial suspension of DCFTA provisions, Georgia's preferential trade access to the EU market, though this requires unanimity and is therefore procedurally very difficult. Formal suspension of candidate status is a third option, though the Commission's designation of Georgia as "a candidate in name only" already approximates that condition in practice.

In my opinion, the most efficient remaining instrument is personal sanctions against Ivanishvili, his family, and key Georgian Dream officials. Although several Baltic states, as well as France, the Netherlands, Poland, and others, have imposed bilateral sanctions, and more than ten member states have pushed for EU-level Council sanctions, the issue has been blocked by Slovakia and Hungary. After the Hungarian elections and the defeat of Viktor Orbán, Slovakia’s Fico alone is weak and more vulnerable to EU pressure. Some suggest Bulgaria and its pro-Russian president, Rumen Radev, could step in to assume the blocking role Hungary previously held, though that remains largely questionable and is to be seen. The bottom line is that the tools are still available, and for the first time, there are fewer restrictions; now, it depends on political will to utilize them. 

Public support for EU membership in Georgia remains strong, though the governing party's rhetoric toward Brussels has grown increasingly hostile. How do you explain this gap between Georgian society's European aspirations and the government's recent strategic posture?

This is one of the defining paradoxes of contemporary Georgian politics, and it is important to be clear about what it is and what it is not. This is not a government responding to its public – it is a government actively working against the preferences of its public while attempting to reshape them through sustained disinformation. All recent surveys show a majority support for EU membership that rarely falls below 70% and sometimes approaches 86%. These figures have held relatively stable despite years of government-orchestrated anti-EU messaging. 

First, and most fundamentally, Georgian Dream has undergone what I call the oligarchic capture. Once a broad opposition coalition, it has over the past decade turned into an instrument of Ivanishvili's personal interests. Oligarchs’ fear of western-backed accountability instruments, asset freezes, and corruption prosecutions creates a structural incentive to undermine precisely the rule-of-law conditionality that EU membership would require. The ruling elite uses the state apparatus for personal enrichment while deploying populist, largely misleading rhetoric to maintain political support from their own electorate, which might not otherwise back anti-Western policies.

Second, Georgian Dream has constructed a sophisticated ideological justification (Orbán-style illiberalism) for its pivot that does not openly declare a pro-Russian position but instead frames Brussels as an existential threat to Georgian sovereignty, traditional values, and security. 

Third, the timing of the pivot is geopolitically calibrated. GD's acceleration of anti-Western rhetoric coincided with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which the party instrumentalized as evidence of the dangers of Western-aligned foreign policy. The populist argument that Ukraine's NATO and EU aspirations provoked Russian aggression is precisely the narrative line promoted by Moscow and further augmented by GD, positioning the current government as the prudent protector of Georgian sovereignty against the recklessness of pro-Western forces. 

As a fact, Georgian Dream's support base consists of rural voters, state-sector employees, beneficiaries of patronage networks, and socially conservative citizens responding to nativist rhetoric. This model does not require broad public support for an anti-EU course. It only requires that the negative consequences of distancing from the EU are not clearly visible or directly felt by voters. As long as these costs remain compensated or difficult to attribute, they are unlikely to translate into political pressure on the ruling party. The EU has also limited the mechanisms through which public dissatisfaction and resistance could transform into electoral accountability.

PM of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan has explicitly stated that the stalled EU–Georgia bilateral cooperation is the single biggest obstacle to its own European integration. What does Georgia's ambiguous positioning mean for the broader EU integration prospects of the South Caucasus region?

Without a stable, predictable, and ideally EU-aligned Georgia, Armenia's economic and logistical integration with Europe is structurally constrained regardless of what Yerevan commits to politically. Armenia passed legislation in March 2025, formally launching its EU accession track, which is a remarkable process for a country that was a founding member of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union and hosts a Russian military base. Pashinyan's government has been dealing with an extraordinarily difficult strategic reorientation since the fall of Karabakh in 2023, which destroyed the remaining leftovers of Armenian trust in Russian security guarantees.

At the logistical and transit level, an authoritarian Georgia increasingly aligned with Russia is less likely to maintain the trade facilitation, customs harmonization, and rule-of-law standards that smooth EU-oriented commerce. At the political level, the EU's reluctance to engage seriously with a new candidate while its existing candidate is openly hostile risks signaling that neighborhood policy lacks coherence in the face of Russian interference.

Some interpreted his remarks as having been made partly at Georgian Dream's request, as he had visited Tbilisi and met with Georgian leadership days before his Strasbourg appearance. Georgian Dream officials subsequently attempted to weaponize his words, claiming that the EU had "unilaterally" halted dialogue, which is of course the opposite of what happened: it was the Georgian government that suspended its own accession process. Pashinyan himself rejected the interpretation that he had acted at Georgian Dream's behest. 

More broadly, Georgia's regression is a stress test for the entire Eastern Partnership framework, which was designed around graduated conditionality leading toward integration – a model that has broadly worked in the Western Balkans and is being tested in Ukraine and Moldova. For Armenia, the message is clear: Georgian–EU re-engagement is not merely a neighbor’s problem – it is an Armenian strategic interest of the first order.

Following Ambassador Herczynski's warning that Georgia is not on the right path and risks returning to a "dark past," Tbilisi summoned him to the Foreign Ministry – a step typically associated with adversarial diplomatic relations. After the subsequent meeting between Foreign Minister Botchorishvili and the Ambassador, the EU Delegation stated that "persistent anti-EU rhetoric damages and undermines the credibility of Georgia's EU aspirations" and highlighted that the country is further drifting away from the European path. How substantial is the latter diplomatic rupture, and what would it take to restore a certain level of reciprocal trust between Tbilisi and Brussels?

The episode is best understood not as an isolated incident but as a concentrated expression of the structural breakdown in Georgian–EU relations that has been accelerating since mid-2024 and, equally, as a case study in the manipulation techniques Georgian Dream now deploys as standard operating procedure.

Ambassador Herczyński spoke on 23 April 2026 at the opening of the "Georgia in Focus" documentary photo exhibition at the EEAS in Brussels, stating that decisions in the coming weeks and months would determine whether Georgia "belongs to the family of European countries based on democracy, rule of law, and human rights, or unfortunately would move back to its dark past." He then added: "We cannot let Georgia and the wonderful, warm, hospitable Georgian people go back to the dark times of violence, civil war, poverty, deprivation, and corruption. This is not the future they deserve." He closed by pledging that once the Georgian authorities were willing to engage, the EU would do its utmost to help Georgia become a member. Read in full, this was an expression of solidarity addressed directly to the Georgian public, not a threat directed at the government.

Within hours on 23 April, Prime Minister Kobakhidze, Tbilisi Mayor Kaladze, parliamentary majority leader Kirtskhalia, and Parliament Speaker Papuashvili all issued near-identical characterisations, with Kobakhidze declaring that "when the EU ambassador threatens the Georgian people with civil war and impoverishment, it is simply unthinkable." On 27 April, Foreign Minister Botchorishvili formally summoned Herczyński to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and charged that Brussels was "encouraging polarization" and a "radical agenda." The summoning of an EU ambassador by a would-be member state is virtually unprecedented in the history of EU enlargement. 

PM Kobakhidze himself, after the meeting, downplayed further escalation, suggesting the summoning was primarily a domestic political signal, a demonstration of sovereignty to the party's core electorate, rather than a genuine move toward rupture. The EU Delegation notably described the encounter as a "substantive discussion," deliberately softening the Georgian government's maximalist framing.

The cumulative damage to trust, however, is real and durable, and it has been inflicted not by a single episode but by a pattern over the past years. What would restoration require? The EU has been consistent and clear on this point: not rhetorical commitments but verifiable, substantive course correction. That means the release of political prisoners and imprisoned opposition leaders; repeal or fundamental amendment of the foreign agents law and other Russia-modelled legislation; a credible independent audit of the October 2024 elections with genuine openness to a rerun; restoration of independent judiciary mechanisms and media freedom; and resumed engagement with the nine reform steps under the December 2023 candidacy conditions.

Indeed, a functional and successful bilateral reset between Georgia and the European Union requires the ruling party to accept dismantling the legislative, judicial, and media infrastructure of control it has spent years constructing, which would directly threaten Ivanishvili's business and political empire. No self-interested authoritarian ruling party makes that concession voluntarily. The realistic scenarios for trust restoration, therefore, run through political change in Georgia, whether through electoral pressure, internal Georgian Dream fragmentation, or civic mobilization reaching a critical threshold rather than through diplomatic negotiation with the current leadership.

Interview conducted by Luka Okropirashvili for Caucasus Watch