Georgians Protest for One Year Straight Despite Increased Oppression

11/29/2025

By: Daniel Miller

For the past year, not a single quiet night has passed as Georgian citizens have taken to the streets to protest the rigged parliamentary election that maintained the ruling Georgian Dream party’s grip on power. The demands have always remained the same: a new round of fair elections that are monitored by international observers, the release of all political prisoners, and a committed pathway toward integration with the European Union – a position in which roughly 4 out of every 5 Georgians support and was a key campaign promise by the GD. 

Local elections were held a month ago, which were boycotted by the majority of the population, as they instead took to the streets of Tbilisi. While the majority of protesters were there peacefully, some engaged in an unorganized effort to occupy the presidential palace, even going so far as to tear down the gate and part of the fence, but stalled out once that threshold was crossed. The strength in numbers was overwhelming, but very few were willing to do what was necessary to occupy the building. As a result, more protesters were arrested and beaten, and the organizers of the protest were subsequently arrested and charged with sedition.

What followed were more repressive laws and weeks of arbitrary arrests, in which the number of political prisoners has now far surpassed those in Russia. It should come as no surprise to hear reports that they are being treated inhumanely and are held in abhorrent conditions. Recently, Russian activist Anastasia Zinovkina and her boyfriend were each sentenced to 8.5 years on trumped-up drug charges. According to Publika, her pre-existing back problem has rendered her unable to get out of bed on her own. She soon fell after trying to make it to the toilet on her own, screaming for eight hours for help, but the guards told her through the window that there was nothing they could do. The same nurse who said she needed a neurologist tossed a diaper at her since she was unable to reach the toilet on her own.

The illegitimate government passed a law making it illegal to wear a mask or face covering of any kind in public for any reason. People who are caught face up to fifteen days in jail, and repeat “offenders” face up to a year. 

But it doesn’t really matter if someone is wearing a mask or not because not all who do are arrested, and the police arbitrarily decide who is arrested anyway, as was the case with a man who was arrested for squeaking a rubber chicken at the police. As a show of solidarity, people showed up with their own squeaking rubber chickens the following day. The rest of the protesters live with a constant fear of being abducted or beaten, with activist Giorgi Akhobadze being a recent case, who was beaten by men claiming to be police officers after arriving from Europe after they stopped his taxi near the airport.

Soon after the October 26th protests, eight opposition party leaders were placed under investigation for various crimes against the state, which include sabotage, assistance in hostile activities to a foreign state, financing activities directed against the constitutional order of Georgia and the foundations of national security, and calling for the violent change of the constitutional order of Georgia or the overthrow of the state government.

Media outlets that are even mildly critical of the regime are hanging on by a thread, and journalists continue to face harassment, beatings, and arrests. Journalists Ninia Kakabadze and Girogi Mamniashvili were two such examples, as they were both arrested on different nights while actively reporting and wearing press badges. 

The Georgian diaspora, watching their country become further entrenched in authoritarian rule, is no longer allowed to make their voices heard from abroad because the GD stripped voting rights away from those living outside of the country. The concern is that they could be corrupted by outside forces. And let’s not forget about how they are helping Russia evade Western sanctions imposed on it because of the invasion of Ukraine. 

The fervor and momentum of the protesters have only seemed to intensify in the past month despite increasingly oppressive measures to make it die down. The Georgian people have shown that they’d rather overload the prison system and drown in extortionist fines than submit to an illegitimate authoritarian government that aligns itself with autocratic nations instead of democratic ones. Many of them can still remember what it was like living under Soviet rule, and many more of them still remember the tumultuous 1990s and Russia’s invasion in 2008. There is no stopping them. The regime will eventually fall.