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The arrests followed clashes on Saturday, as many opposition parties boycotted local elections.
Georgian prosecutors on Monday charged five opposition leadership figures with attempting to overthrow the government, after protests on Saturday culminated in clashes between police and demonstrators in the country’s capital, Tbilisi.
The country’s Ministry of Internal Affairs said 13 people had been arrested in connection with the unrest.
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Tens of thousands of antigovernment demonstrators rallied at Freedom Square in Tbilisi on Saturday, as the country of 3.7 million people voted in local elections. Some leaders promised a “peaceful revolution”, even as the largest opposition blocs boycotted the elections.
However, a smaller group of protesters attempted to enter the presidential palace minutes before polls closed. They were repelled by riot police using gas and water cannon.
The charges against the five men carry a maximum prison sentence of nine years. Among those arrested was a world-renowned opera singer and activist, Paata Burchuladze, who read out at the rally a declaration claiming “power returns to the people” and branding the government “illegitimate”.
The Internal Affairs Ministry said on Saturday it had opened an investigation into “calls to violently alter Georgia’s constitutional order or overthrow state authority” while Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze pledged more opposition arrests Sunday in what he termed an attempted “coup”.
He told journalists that “no one will go unpunished… Many more must expect sentences for the violence they carried out against the state and law enforcement.”
On Sunday evening, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside parliament, blocking traffic on Tbilisi’s main avenue and pledging to keep protesting until the ruling Georgian Dream party leaves power.
Georgia’s State Security Service (SSS) said it had found a large cache of firearms, ammunition and explosives in a forest hideout near Tbilisi that was procured by a Georgian national on instructions from a Georgian man fighting with Ukrainian forces.
Choosing sides in a war
Saturday’s local polls were Georgian Dream’s first electoral test since a disputed parliamentary vote a year ago plunged the Black Sea nation into turmoil and prompted a freeze on Georgia’s accession bid to European Union candidacy. In October 2024, Georgian Dream won a comfortable victory in parliamentary elections that were accused of being fraudulent by the opposition.
The central election commission said Georgian Dream had secured municipal council majorities in every municipality on Saturday’s election and that its candidates scored landslide wins in mayoral races in all cities. These outcomes were largely expected, with most opposition parties boycotting the vote.
The normally low-key local elections acquired high stakes after months of raids on independent media, restrictions on civil society and the jailing of dozens of opponents and activists. Rights groups say some 60 people – among them key opposition figures, journalists and activists – have been jailed over the past year. Georgian Dream has pledged to ban all major opposition parties.
The country has been rocked by protests for more than a year, with supporters of the opposition accusing the ruling Georgian Dream party of authoritarianism and of seeking to drag the country, once among the Soviet Union’s most pro-Western successor states, back towards Russia.
Georgian Dream, however, says it is not pro-Russian and that it eventually wants to join the EU, while also keeping the peace with Moscow and preserving what it calls Georgia’s traditional Orthodox Christian values.
The party is widely seen as controlled by billionaire ex-prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, who is sanctioned by the US for what it calls his promotion of Russian interests.
Leonid Slutsky, chair of the Russian State Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee and a close ally of Vladimir Putin, has hailed Georgian Dream’s victory as an “inspiring triumph” and accused the EU and Baltic states of “meddling in the country’s internal affairs”, according to Georgian media outlet Formula News.
The news site also mentioned the EU Commission Vice President Kaja Kallas condemning the conditions under which Georgia’s elections were held, saying they took place “in an environment of large-scale suppression of dissent”.
