Georgia’s disputed ruling party announced plans to ban major opposition parties in October last year. However, as the deadline approaches, it appears to be trying to prolong the process.
It all started in October 2025, when, after months of preparing the groundwork, Georgian Dream officially filed a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court to ban three mainstream opposition parties: the United National Movement, Ahali, and Lelo. These were three of the four political parties that received the most votes in the disputed 2024 parliamentary elections. The fourth party, For Georgia, led by Georgian Dream’s former prime minister Giorgi Gakharia, who is now in exile, avoided initial inclusion in the case by entering Parliament after a year-long boycott amid the political crisis.
In practice, banning political parties means that their members and associated individuals will lose their passive electoral rights – they will no longer be eligible to run for seats in Parliament or local councils. They will also be barred from holding leadership positions in constitutional bodies, joining other political parties, or donating to political organisations. Moreover, if members of a banned party attempt to register a new one, it will automatically be treated as a “successor party” and banned through a simplified procedure.
In Georgia, constitutional lawsuits are required to be reviewed within nine months, after which the court can issue its decision at any time, unless Parliament specifies otherwise. In this case, Parliament requested that both the hearing and the final decision be completed within nine months.
With that timeline, the major opposition parties should have been banned by now. However, as the date of the decision approached, in April 2026, Georgian Dream’s Parliament Speaker, Shalva Papuashvili, announced that they were adding another party to the list: the Federalists, who, according to Papuashvili, had not been included in the initial case simply because they had “no prospect of crossing the threshold.”
What is interesting is that the Georgian Dream had two ways to include the Federalists in the list. One was simply to file a brand-new lawsuit targeting that party specifically, which would not have affected the ongoing lawsuit. The second was to retract the existing lawsuit and refile it. They chose the latter. This gave the Constitutional Court another nine months to finalise its decision.
This could have been considered a misjudgment on their part, had they not done it again. On September 14, Georgian Dream representative Irakli Kirtskhalia announced that they were including ex-PM Gakharia’s party as well and would therefore restart the whole process, giving the Constitutional Court another nine months.
Ironically, just two days before that statement, Shalva Papuashvili claimed that opposition parties would be banned by January. It is evident that, despite their threats, there is a reason why they are trying not to push the ban through quickly. There may be different reasons for this, from fear of consequences from the West, to holding on to this card for negotiations with the West in order to prevent further sanctions. On the other hand, there may also be judges who would refuse to put their names on something so consequential.
While the scale of this authoritarian move should alarm international actors, it changes little within Georgia’s current context. If we look at the bigger picture, whether political parties are banned today or nine months later does not really make a major difference. Since spring 2024, Georgian Dream has passed a number of repressive laws that limit the freedom of elections.
From stripping Georgian media and CSOs of vital funding, to criminalising protest on various grounds, criminalising social media posts, banning emigrants from voting in the upcoming elections, having more political prisoners per capita than Russia, and keeping criminal cases against all political leaders ready to arrest them again at any time, with politicians and journalists already in jail, there is not much space left for free and fair elections even without officially banning political parties.
Journalist and editor based in Georgia.
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