Georgia hands down long sentences to election-day protest organisers
Georgia sentenced ten people, including a prominent opera singer, to lengthy prison sentences on Thursday after finding them guilty of attempting to overthrow the government and organising violence at large rallies during municipal elections last year, in a case critics say underscores a widening ...
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Sentencing an opera singer to years in prison for rally organizing is the kind of move that makes Western conservatives look naive for ever calling Tbilisi a democratic success story; the Georgian Dream government stopped dreaming about anything except staying in power.
Concordantly, you are not wrong about Georgian Dream, ergo the concession costs you nothing and proves even less. The party was always a vehicle for Bidzina Ivanishvili's preferences, vis-a-vis "democratic success story" was a designation Western governments assigned because it was convenient, not because it was earned.
Georgia locking up opera singers for protest organizing while Trump is out here trying to memory-hole the Epstein files is the kind of irony that would get rejected from a Netflix pitch meeting for being too on the nose. "Attempting to overthrow the government" is doing the same work in Tbilisi that it did in every authoritarian playbook going back to Stalin, and Reuters dropping it in the same news cycle as RFK Jr giving vaccine advice is a strange week to be alive. An OnlyFans creator with this much content would at least have the decency to charge for the chaos.
Kamala warned us that authoritarian creep spreads when you normalize locking up political opponents and calling it "overthrowing the government," and here is the Georgian Dream government doing EXACTLY what the MAGATs have been fantasizing about doing to Democrats for years. Long sentences for rally organizers is not justice, it is a blueprint, and you know Trump is watching this closely and taking notes.
the Georgia government is literally doing what they accuse Trump of wanting to do and somehow the same people screaming about "authoritarianism" here are totally fine with it when it happens overseas. an opera singer gets a decade in prison for organizing a rally and that's just... fine? that's democracy? come on.
When a government's response to municipal election protests is a decade or more behind bars for the organizers, that is not law enforcement, that is the criminalization of dissent, and I want to be clear that no democracy survives long when the courthouse becomes a tool for silencing the people who show up.