“Overall, the Democracy Festival’s activities could be considered as a foreign interference into the electoral process, which would not be tolerated anywhere, including in Denmark,” the Georgian Parliament Speaker Salva Papuashvili wrote on the social network.

The Speaker noted that all political parties have begun their pre-election campaigns, with some violating rules, including receiving funding from foreign countries.

Papuashvili emphasized that such violations necessitate appropriate clarification from both domestic and international actors. He stated that the public deserves answers and that all parties must adhere to the rules and procedures governing the election process.

“Georgia is gearing up for Parliamentary elections scheduled on 26 October 2024. All political parties have already launched their pre-election campaigns. And some of them violate the rules already, alas, with the funding from foreign countries. Knowing and ignoring the rules of electoral process and electoral integrity, these political parties seem to opt for electoral violations, hoping that election monitors and funding actors will turn a blind eye.

The latest case of such violation has been so-called Democracy Festival organised by NGO Eastern Centre for Multiparty Democracy (EECMD) and funded by the Danish side. It has been held three times already, despite the fact that it has little to do with either democracy or festival, and is problematic on several counts:

In the first place, some of the organisers of the ‘Festival’ are politicians themselves, disguised as civil society activists. This fact would probably be the yet another usual hypocricy of our opponents but this time it is aggravated by the fact that the ‘Festival’ is being funded by a foreign country – Denmark.

Georgian legislation, as in many other countries, forbids foreign funding of political parties. However, a founder and several EECMD staff members are directly involved in politics, being part of a political union under Lelo party.

Moreover, the political parties, selected by the organisers (i.e. EECMD) to participate in the Festival, including Lelo party, used the Festival for their political purposes, having conducted pre-election campaigning by political agitation, distribution of flyers of their respective political parties, installing promotion banners, etc. In fact, this constitutes a pre-election political campaign using foreign funding.

There might be an expectation that anything that contains the word ‘democracy’ is democratic and about democracy. Unfortunately, this was not the case with Democracy Festival. A banner depicting Georgia’s former President Mikheil Saakashvili, well-known for his anti-democratic rule, was prominently displayed at the Festival, promoting his political agenda. Saakashvili is convicted for several grave crimes and is currently serving his legitimate sentence in Georgia. Such promotion of a criminal’s political agenda constitutes a romantisation and justification of crime-based governance. To repeat, campaigning in Saakashvili’s behalf was conducted with Danish, i.e. foreign money.

Overall, to sum up, the format of the Festival is legally dubious. Its activities, in essence, provided support for political parties’ pre-election agitation via foreign funding. This could be considered as a foreign interference into the electoral process, which would not be tolerated anywhere, including in Denmark.

Violations of this magnitude need proper justification from all relevant actors inside and outside of Georgia. People deserve answers; rules and procedures of electoral process must be respected. Despite society’s critical position and media’s questions, the Danish embassy remains silent,” the Speaker stated.