TBILISI (Realist English). Georgia’s ruling party Georgian Dream has filed a lawsuit with the Constitutional Court seeking to ban three major opposition parties, escalating a deepening political crisis ahead of the 2026 elections.
The motion targets the United National Movement (UNM), Strong Georgia – Lelo, and the Coalition for Change, which Georgian Dream claims have acted “against the constitutional order and national interests.”
The court will decide within the next three days whether to register the case. Once accepted, judges will have nine months to issue a ruling.
“The claim is so full of evidence — the harm these parties have caused to the country is so clear — that I cannot imagine any court in the world refusing to satisfy it,” said David Matikashvili, a Georgian Dream lawmaker.
Originally, the list also included former Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia’s party For Georgia, but the ruling party decided to drop it from the suit after Gakharia ended his parliamentary boycott.
The move has drawn sharp condemnation from European officials.
Rasa Juknevičienė, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Georgia, wrote on social media that the news was “shocking,” calling Georgian Dream a “twin of Lukashenko — straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook.”
Former Georgian president Salome Zurabishvili warned that the persecution of opposition forces “destroys multi-party democracy, divides society, and undermines the state.”
Levan Bezhashvili, a leader of the United National Movement, said the parties will appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that the case violates fundamental political freedoms.
“The European Court’s standards on party dissolution are very strict, and the precedent is clearly in our favor,” Bezhashvili said.
If successful, the lawsuit would mark an unprecedented step in Georgia’s post-Soviet history, effectively dismantling most of the opposition and tightening the ruling party’s grip on power — a move critics say would push the country further away from its European path.
