“Yesterday evening was the final chord proving that Georgia truly deserves a better opposition,” declared the Speaker of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, in response to a question put to him.

Papuashvili was asked to comment on the opposition alliance’s rally held the previous day.

As the Speaker noted, “yesterday was a verdict on the radical opposition.”

“As they say, however hard you try to hide misfortune, misfortune will not hide itself. And this particular misfortune did not hide itself. Yesterday we witnessed a United National Movement rally in all its glory: its aesthetics, its placards, its slogans, its faces, an event organised by Mikheil Saakashvili’s cronies and the senior figures of his regime: Gvaramia, Bokeria, Vashadze.

This is what the Georgian people saw once again: people who are hell-bent on tearing society apart at a moment when the country is celebrating, poisoning that celebration for everyone. We saw their attempts to conjure up some semblance of radical energy, but even that energy is long gone, lost long ago.

So yesterday was a verdict on the radical opposition. The few thousand people gathered around them are precisely the sort of Facebook bubble that mistakes itself for a society, when in reality it amounts to nothing more than a single Facebook friends list. Their very slogans made it plain that what they wanted was to be seen on social media, to make a show of themselves for others. So it was yet another significant moment that showed us the true face of the radical opposition,” Papuashvili declared.