MP Tengiz Sharmanashvili: October 4 rally led to total collapse of the opposition; years of misguided strategy made it inevitable

“The protest rally on 4 October 2025 triggered the complete collapse of the opposition following years of strategic blunders that made such an outcome inevitable,” parliamentary majority MP Tengiz Sharmanashvili stated on Monday.

Sharmanashvili asserted that opposition factions had “brought ruin entirely upon themselves.”

“The fact that 61 opposition MPs are not sitting in parliament to challenge the government is down entirely to them and their foreign patrons. By refusing to engage with legitimate constitutional bodies and pivoting instead toward street protests and revolutionary plots, the opposition sealed its own fate. They naively believed the government was on the brink of collapse, convinced that a single, final push would bring down the entire system. You will recall the organisers’ bold claims ahead of that rally: ‘Everything ends on the 4th; they are effectively crumbling.’ They kept reassuring themselves that only a tiny effort remained, leading directly to the abysmal standings reflected in recent IRI polls. They engineered their own ruin without needing anyone else’s help,” Sharmanashvili said.

Turning to international backing, Sharmanashvili argued that Brussels would never publicly acknowledge its funding of these political movements.

“A day or two before 8 October, an official EU spokesperson came out and welcomed ‘democratic processes’ in Tbilisi, despite an explicitly pre-announced overthrow plot. We did not invent the word ‘overthrow’. Whether you dress it up with prefixes like ‘democratic overthrow’ or ‘peaceful overthrow’ is irrelevant—an overthrow is an overthrow. Yet Brussels endorsed it at the time, funding these revolutionary and unlawful processes. They drove the groups calling themselves opposition into total ruin, to the point where most of them no longer even have a political pulse,” he said.

“Brussels will never accept blame or admit that a colossal error was made: not only on their part, but by pushing their local acolytes in Georgia into making those mistakes. I do not expect them to ever admit it. They find confession difficult, compounding one error with a second, a second with a third, trapping themselves in a vicious cycle. We are not speaking out of schadenfreude, nor will we patronise Brussels by saying ‘Look, you erred once again.’ Let us sit down and resolve this. Abandon these tactics aimed at fueling unconstitutional processes in Georgia, and if our bilateral relations return to a standard, constructive track, we stand ready. The tragedy is that they are simply not ready for that step,” Sharmanashvili added.