MEP Viola von Cramon sat down in an interview with GPB First Channel covering a number of topics.

Cramon believes the Georgian government “has same chances” to get EU candidate status, as “under the current situation, Georgia was granted the EU Perspective with the clear conditionality,” but “what we have seen so far was not very satisfying.”

“On the technical side, we are not satisfied, and we are rather wondering why this government does not take the opportunity we have given to them. It needs to be a dialogue. And, of course, the European Union offers the same as they have offered to Moldova and to Ukraine at the same time. But looking at the level of reforms and the level of political pluralism, democratic institutions, rule of law, and so on, we have to admit that even during the war time, Ukraine did much more and is doing much more, Moldova is way ahead at the moment than Georgia. And Georgia has a very questionable development with cooperating with Russia in a more intense way than they have done in the past, cooperating with Chinese investors, letting Russian capital flow into the country. A lot of Russian citizens take residence status here,” she stated.

Cramon underscored the importance of the European Commission’s priorities that the nation should meet.

“But what I could imagine personally, as I said, is it’s not the German government, it’s not the European parliament, it is that we find a compromise on which we grant the candidate status now, but maybe with a revoke clause and then work on this for the next two, three years. And if they are not met, hopefully, they would find an option to revoke, to take this back,” she said.

MEP Cramon stressed the importance of various reforms in a number of areas, including anti-oligarchization, depolarization of the society, judiciary reforms, and pluralism in the parliament.

“Most of the people have seen the progress was rather low. One could also imagine that the ruling party, the government is not too keen to get the candidate status. Does it mean that the whole, the entire country can be kept hostage, I would say no, but let’s see what would come out. And still, there is time. My hope is that we see Georgia as a member of the European Union in the near future and the steps between might be very bumpy. I’m afraid we are now in a very bumpy phase, but we should not lose the long-term perspective of this country,” she asserted.

As for the time frame, “This is not to be done within a few weeks. That takes a lot of work.”

“Time-wise I would say if we are there in seven years, this would be great. This would be fast. I would even consider 10 years as much more realistic than seven years. So, if Charles Michel speaks about seven years, I would say let’s raise the expectation not too high and be more realistic because it might take much longer due to, as I said, the requirements set up by the European Union, but also due to, of course, the political developments in the enlargement countries,” she added.