We are often urged to use a different tone when speaking about European institutions, the prime minister said, but when the European Parliament approves a resolution like this and holds debates of this nature it is very difficult to offer any positive comment, or to avoid a negative one, by Interpressnews’s translation of his remarks. By the prime minister’s measure the Supreme Soviet was in better shape in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union counted down its final years. The European Parliament and the whole European bureaucracy are in a dire state, and the matter is no longer of interest to Georgian society, he added.
Papuashvili went further on the same day. The way Georgians were reviled in Strasbourg on Thursday is exactly how Russian and non-Russian Soviet deputies reviled them at the Congress of People’s Deputies after 9 April 1989, the speaker said, counting the ninth resolution with a hostile subtext and the third to carry his own name, and naming the European People’s Party and the Lithuanian MEP Rasa Juknevičienė, whom he called an associate of Gorbachev, among those behind it. Kakha Kaladze, the party’s general secretary, told journalists at 13:28 that the European Parliament’s function has been devalued and that its resolutions carry no weight and are riddled with lies.
By the prime minister’s measure the Supreme Soviet was in better shape in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union counted down its final years.
The resolution adopted on Thursday by 445 votes to 37, with 97 abstentions, condemns the attempt to ban the opposition parties, demands the withdrawal of the lawsuit at the Constitutional Court and asks the EU to sanction Bidzina Ivanishvili, Kobakhidze, Papuashvili and Kaladze. Georgia goes onto the Foreign Affairs Council’s agenda under current affairs in Luxembourg on Monday, by the EU’s own announcement, at a meeting chaired by Kaja Kallas that starts with Ukraine.
Two constitutional claims of 88 and 89 members of parliament on the constitutionality and prohibition of the opposition parties’ activity, one naming five parties and the other four, are on the court’s page dated 6 October, the day its first chamber sent the case to the plenum, and the court’s hearings calendar printed no date on Friday. The ninth resolution lands on a government that answers each one more sharply than the last, and the member states take their turn on Monday.