Executive Summary:
The Georgian Dream government announced that it will abolish the “Information Center on NATO and EU” on July 1, signaling its growing hostility toward Euro-Atlantic integration and aligning more closely with Kremlin interests.
Georgian Dream has sidelined its ambitions for integration into NATO seemingly to appease Russia, and recent rhetoric increasingly positions NATO as ineffective. Georgian Dream leaders cite Ukraine’s experience as justification for Georgia’s passive stance toward the alliance.
Georgia’s integration efforts are now visibly stalled, with Georgian Dream officials being excluded from NATO summits, and political signals suggest an impending formal withdrawal from NATO aspirations.
Georgian Dream has escalated anti-European propaganda, shifting focus to economic utility while disparaging the European Union’s cultural and political values.
Public support for EU membership in Georgia remains high, yet trust in the European Union has reportedly declined, likely due to manipulated polling by government-affiliated agencies.
The Georgian Dream government announced that it will abolish the “Information Center for NATO and EU” on July 1. The previous pro-Western Georgian government established the center in 2005 to increase public awareness of Western values and popularize the idea of the country’s accession to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Interpressnews, June 4). This decision prompted the NATO Liaison Office in Georgia to issue a brief statement on June 9, reaffirming NATO’s commitment to the 2008 Bucharest Summit’s decision to make Georgia a NATO member (Facebook/NATO in Georgia, June 9). After Georgian Dream came to power in 2012, the topic of Georgia’s accession to NATO gradually disappeared, as it was deemed to be a potential irritant to Moscow. During its rule, Georgian Dream brought the topic of EU accession to the forefront, pushing NATO accession to the background. Alongside the intensification of its aggressive policy toward the European Union, however, Georgian Dream has now gradually begun to incorporate the topic of NATO into its anti-Western rhetoric.
On June 10, the chairman of the Georgian Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, commented on the June 9 statement from the NATO office in Georgia:
A statement is good, but no one can protect the security of a country with a statement, and we have seen this in the example of Ukraine, about which many statements are made, but everyone understands that the most effective protection is the NATO nuclear umbrella and not statements from NATO offices (1tv.ge, June 10).
This is not the first verbal confrontation between the Georgian Dream and NATO. Georgian Dream has recently been more active in verbally attacking EU representatives and occasionally criticizing NATO in a manner similar to the Kremlin (see EDM, May 7, June 4).
In 2023, then-Prime Minister of Georgia Irakli Garibashvili called Kyiv’s desire to join NATO the reason for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Civil Georgia, May 30, 2023). Georgian Dream indirectly accused NATO of provoking Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and demonstrated its skepticism toward the issue of integration into NATO. Due to this commentary, Garibashvili, who was considered an “undesirable guest,” was not invited to the NATO summit in Vilnius in July 2023 (Tabula.ge, July 12, 2023).
In 2024, the current Georgian Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, claimed that “at present, NATO does not have the task of expanding,” thereby justifying his passive policy toward NATO to his population and signaling loyalty to the Kremlin (Tvpirveli.ge, July 22, 2024). Kobakhidze’s skepticism in July 2024 regarding NATO expansion, however, was preceded by the official visit of then-NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg to Georgia in March 2024, during which the prospects for NATO expansion, including through Georgia, were emphasized (Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 19, 2024). Despite the visit of a high-ranking NATO official to Georgia in March 2024, Kobakhidze was not invited to participate in the 75th anniversary NATO summit in Washington, D.C., on July 9–11, 2024. NATO’s rejection of two Georgian prime ministers demonstrated that the process of Georgia’s integration into NATO is stalled, and only the official recognition of this fact remains to be settled. At the end of May, Georgian media reported that at the spring session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly held in Dayton, Ohio on May 23–26, and for the first time in the history of Georgian parliamentarism, voting rights were taken away from Georgia and the participation of the Georgian parliamentary delegation, which included only representatives of the Georgian Dream, was limited (Tabula.ge, May 30). Georgian Dream confirmed to local media on June 18 that Kobakhidze has not received an invitation to participate in the NATO summit scheduled to take place on June 24–25 in The Hague (Tvpirveli.ge;Business Media, June 18).
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Georgian Dream, Maka Bochorishvili, insists that the country is doing everything it can to integrate into Euro-Atlantic structures (1tv.ge, June 10). It became known in May, however, that the Directorate General for European Integration had been abolished within the Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Interpressnews, May 1). Georgian Dream also abolished the Office of the State Minister of Georgia for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration in 2017 (Government of Georgia, November 13, 2017). This ministry in Georgia was established in 2004, coinciding with Georgia’s inclusion in the EU Neighborhood Policy, and was considered an essential component in the Europeanisation of the country.
Recently, Kobakhidze compared the European Parliament to the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. The head of one of Georgia’s parliamentary committees, Irakli Zarkua, called the European Union a powerless organization that no one wants to join, while some countries, on the contrary, want to leave it (Formulanews.ge, May 1; Interpressnews, June 5). Georgian Member of Parliament Mariam Lashkhi called the perception of the European Union as an end, especially among the country’s youth, a mistake. Lashkhi points out that socio-economic well-being should be an end in itself for Georgia, and the European Union is just one of the main means of achieving such well-being (Facebook/Tabula, May 5).
Georgian Dream’s rhetoric, based on the economic aspect of rapprochement with the European Union, contradicts Georgia’s historical narrative of “returning to the European family.” This narrative implies the cultural and civilizational attraction of Georgians to the unified European community. By focusing only on economic benefits, Georgian Dream creates grounds for economic speculation and propaganda. Commenting on the topic of Georgia’s possible entry into the European Union, the official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, Maria Zakharova, said that in the European Union, “those who think about their national economies have nothing to do” (Ekho Kavkaza, April 24).
Georgian Dream is concerned that, despite an aggressive anti-European disinformation campaign, the majority of the country’s population remains in favor of Georgia’s membership in the European Union. Results from a Eurobarometer survey—a public opinion survey regularly conducted on behalf of the European Commission—published at the beginning of May, indicated, however, that the trust of Georgian residents in the European Union has decreased by 9 percent compared to the fall of 2024. Over the past year, it has decreased by 17 percent (EU Eurobarometer 103, May 2025). According to the Eurobarometer, in the spring of 2024, trust in the European Union among the Georgian population was 66 percent, but by the spring of 2025, this had dropped to 49 percent (EU Eurobarometer 103, May 2025).
For many years, the popularity and rating of the European Union in Georgia have traditionally been at a high level. The results of these polls in Georgia were perceived as a logical consequence of Georgian Dream’s aggressive anti-European disinformation campaign. Most local observers, however, doubted the objectivity of these polls. Even though the poll was conducted within the framework of the Standard Eurobarometer, the direct fieldwork within Georgia was carried out by the Georgian opinion research company GORBI. This organization has a close affiliation with Georgian Dream and helps the ruling party in election campaigns through publishing controversial and manipulative poll data (Civil Georgia, June 4). Moreover, local non-governmental organizations have previously accused this research campaign of attempting to influence public opinion through anti-Western rhetoric using techniques typical of authoritarian regimes, such as instilling fear and creating an enemy image (Formulanews.ge, June 14, 2022). On June 12, the head of the EU Delegation to Georgia, Paweł Herczyński, mentioned the decrease in trust in the European Union among the population of Georgia and also expressed doubt with this data, referring to other surveys where trust and popularity of the European Union in Georgia is at a high level (Netgazeti.ge, June 12).
On June 4, local media published the results of another sociological survey conducted by another local research campaign. This survey reported that 80.3 percent of respondents support Georgia’s accession to the European Union, 74.2 percent consider Georgia’s accession to the European Union useful, 77.3 percent are sure that Georgia will receive many advantages by cooperating with the European Union, and 65.8 percent welcome the introduction of EU legislation in Georgia. (Facebook/TVFormula, June 4).
Herczyński also emphasized the presence of a disinformation campaign against the European Union not only in Georgia but also in Serbia, Ukraine, and other countries, and linked this to Russia’s hybrid actions. According to him, there are coordinated attempts that have been going on for several months to undermine confidence in the European Union. He stated, “if you repeat a hundred times, a thousand times, that European integration is wrong, that the European Union is dying, you are demonizing it … it has consequences” (Netgazeti.ge, June 12).
Georgian Dream’s propaganda media are doing everything they can to discredit the European Union. The media is widely advertising a series of television programs called “The Decline of Europe” on social networks, as well as in all news releases and special television reports telling viewers about the migration crisis in the European Union, the socio-economic difficulties in the EU countries, and about the onset of the so-called LGBT+ dictatorship in Europe. Georgian Dream is attempting to intimidate the Georgian population with the prospect of EU membership. On June 12, the Georgian Public Broadcaster, which is under the control of the ruling elite, prepared a television program titled “The End of NATO Expansion?,” which included statements from Alexander Mercouris, an international relations commentator, who assured the Georgian audience that “the era of NATO is over” (YouTube/Georgian Public Broadcaster, June 12). Georgian Dream has begun actively preparing public opinion for a possible official rejection of the NATO integration process.
On June 18, Kobakhidze asserted that NATO made NATO-Georgian relations passive, stating that “this is not our decision, for them it is not a priority” (Tvpirveli.ge, June 18). At this stage, the process of Georgia’s integration into the European Union has already been damaged, Poland and the Baltic countries are already demanding that the visa-free regime for Georgian citizens be suspended, and the EU Ambassador to Georgia states that the EU enlargement regarding Georgia has reached a dead end, and it may lose this historic chance (1tv.ge, April 3; YouTube/@DonaldTusk, June 11; Interpressnews, June 12). For the Kremlin, Georgia’s official refusal to join the European Union is not enough. To fully satisfy its geopolitical interests in the South Caucasus, the Kremlin likely expects Tbilisi to officially renounce its desire to join NATO, and Georgian Dream is likely already seeking a pretext to refuse NATO membership.
This article was originally published in Eurasia Daily Monitor.
Dr. Beka Chedia is a political scientist from Tbilisi, Georgia. He is currently a professor of political science and a Tbilisi-based Country Expert (Georgia) for the independent research institute Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) at the Department of Political Science of the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden.