Last Friday, America announced sanctions against Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Georgian tycoon who made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he was imposing the punishment because Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream party was ‘undermining the democratic and Euro-Atlantic future of Georgia for the benefit of the Russian Federation’.
Georgian Dream triumphed in October’s parliamentary elections and on Sunday a new president, allied to the party, was sworn in as street protests take place in Tbilisi.
Might the ‘lawfare’ that eliminated Georgescu from Romania’s presidential election also be deployed against Marine Le Pen this spring?
The West claims that it was not a free and fair election, a view shared by Ivanishvili’s political opponents in Georgia. One, Nika Gvaramia, has likened the election to a ‘constitutional coup’.
In response to the election result, the EU adopted a resolution in which it rejected the election result and demanded a re-run within a year.
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