GD’s Kirtskhalia: Brussels knows full well that visa requirements are least of our concerns

“They know perfectly well in Brussels, and they have known for years, that for every member of our team, who are fully clear-eyed about where we stand, what we stand for, and whose interests we serve, it matters very little whether or not we shall be required to obtain a visa in our diplomatic passports,” declared the parliamentary majority leader, MP Irakli Kirtskhalia, speaking on the European Union’s decision to suspend visa-free travel for holders of Georgian diplomatic passports.

As Kirtskhalia noted in an appearance on Rustavi 2 TV’s Night Courier, “Brussels, in its wisdom, is resorting to punitive measures” against his political team.

He added that the activation of this mechanism came as no surprise, and that this latest move by the Brussels bureaucracy changes nothing for the ruling team.

“This is the activation of a dirty mechanism belonging to a dirty machine, and it came as no surprise to us. It changes nothing, because we are the ones exposing them: that unelected bureaucracy, that dirty machine, grinding away by inertia or with redoubled force ever since its principal donors from the United States cut off the tap and American funding dried up considerably. We can observe the fury with which this formidable bureaucratic machine is operating within the European Union, particularly in Brussels. Every step they take speaks only to the wrongheadedness of their own policies, on which there is a very great deal more to be said. We see what is happening. We have said it before, years ago, months ago, that the time would come when common sense would reassert itself in their own countries, and people would find their voice,” Kirtskhalia stated.

Kirtskhalia further stated that this was “the last bullet left” in the EU bureaucracy’s arsenal of punitive measures against Georgia.

“Every one of these dirty bullets they fire speaks only to their own character. There were threats to suspend visa-free travel for the entire Georgian public; let me repeat what we have always said: there is no legal or political basis whatsoever for such a move, and this is the one bullet they have left. Along with all the chaos they have provoked, especially since 2022, when they failed to install a subservient, compromised government here, and when they couldn’t roll out the red carpet for them in Brussels or other capitals as they had with other captured regimes, the full force of this campaign was ultimately directed against our country.

This final bullet is what they have left as a punitive instrument against our society. Our country, our people, have never bowed their heads before anyone throughout history, and believe me, they will not bow before Brussels. Brussels, which has laid itself utterly bare, exposed in all its squalor, the very squalor in which it so arrogantly governs its own member states and lords it over them,” Kirtskhalia concluded.