“I sincerely hope that our member states will follow the advice of the European Commission and will make a positive decision on granting Georgia candidate status,” said Pawel Herczynski, EU Ambassador to Georgia.

According to the Ambassador, the EU wants to see progress over the nine steps, which the European Commission identified for Georgia.

“As we all know, on the 8th of November, the European Commission has given a positive recommendation to grant Georgia candidate status. This recommendation from the European Commission will be discussed by 27 EU member states during the upcoming European Council. This is the meeting of EU leaders, 27 heads of state and government on the 14th and 15th of December.

I sincerely hope that our member states will follow the advice of the European Commission and will make a positive decision on granting Georgia candidate status. The European Commission, together with its positive recommendation, also identified nine steps. We call them steps. We will see if member states will also confirm those nine steps. Some of those nine steps are very familiar because they are the former 12 priorities that are still in the phase of implementation. So there is working progress. Some of the steps are new, like fighting disinformation, fighting foreign information manipulation, the issue of elections, upcoming elections next year,” he said.

The Ambassador noted that the electoral process should be fair and free.

“The electoral process should be as fair and free as possible. If the question is what step is most important, all of them are equally important, and we sincerely would like to see progress on all of them. What is very important is not to wait. But to make sure that the implementation of those nine steps starts as early as possible. And, of course, as always, the process is extremely important.

So, we would like to see everyone to play its role, the government to be inclusive. The opposition to be constructive. And to see as much progress as possible so that Georgia can very quickly move to the next steps, to open accession negotiations, to close accession negotiations and to become a full member of the European Union as quickly as possible,” he said.