The Georgian Ruling Party's Discursive Confrontations with Domestic and Foreign Actors

Abstract

This paper discusses the Georgian ruling party's discursive confrontations with the country's strategic partners (especially the EU) and domestic actors (political opponents, NGOs, and Georgian youth, especially Gen Z). The author argues that although the ruling party boasts about its achievements on the way to Georgia's Europeanization, its pro-European aspirations have been questioned by domestic actors since 2014 and by the EU since 2021. Furthermore, the ruling party's discursive confrontations with both domestic actors and the EU have intensified since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Georgia refused to join the EU's sanctions against Russia, and peaked in April 2024, after the reintroduction (for the third time) of a draft law targeting civil society and independent media. The latter clearly indicates the ruling party's normative and discursive disengagement from the EU and the shift of its political vector towards Russia.