New, free, and democratic elections are the only way to end this imitative surrealism, calm the country, and return it to its natural path of development, writes Salome Samadashvili, one of the leaders of the party Lelo - Strong Georgia, on social media.

As Samadashvili notes, there is no time to waste, because “a regime gripped by the fear of drowning is dragging the entire country toward the bottom.”

“About the drama of a failed academic marriage, about the so-called education ‘reform,’ about the ‘relentless fight’ against corruption and high prices, about cases of ‘sabotaging the country’s interests’ that begin tomorrow, and other simulated processes of governing the country…

Beyond this imitated ‘Georgian Dream-style’ surrealism, in the real, visible, and ‘measurable’ world, what was once merely the wish of Georgian patriots has become, if not yet a reality, then a real possibility.

Just five years ago, Georgia’s accession to the European Union was only a wish; today, it is Europe’s plan. Integrating our country into Europe’s security system was once a wish; today, it is an EU strategy. New U.S. strategic investments in our region, which directly create security guarantees, were once a wish - today, the U.S. Vice President has turned them into reality in our neighboring countries…

Bidzina Ivanishvili has left Georgia outside all these processes, isolated from the West. Georgia, which was the West’s main pillar in the region, has been left in the position of an outsider, a marginalized state.

As a result, this government itself has fallen into crisis. Since the restoration of independence, the main compass of the country’s development has been the Western foreign policy vector. Sometimes we followed the direction indicated by this compass successfully, sometimes less so - but the compass existed. Ivanishvili abolished the main axis of the state’s development when he renounced strategic relations with the West. What remains in his hands are more than three million citizens, to whom he must offer an alternative political agenda. He cannot tell them the truth - that our ship, left without a compass, is drifting in one direction, toward Russia.

Yet every regime, even the most brutal and autocratic, inevitably needs a political agenda. That agenda can be any madness - from building communism in the Soviet Union, to constructing empty new cities in Asian autocracies, to Putin’s war in Ukraine. Ivanishvili’s provincial-scale autocracy lacks the resources to create any grand agenda: it cannot wage wars of conquest, nor can it build new cities. Therefore, it must invent things such as regulating the number of neighborhood shops to ‘control prices,’ merging universities, allowing only one higher education institution in a city to provide accounting education, arresting an entire former cabinet of ministers, or detaining an opposition leader for allegedly planning to dig a tunnel from Bombay to Tbilisi…

It does not matter what madness the regime invents, because it no longer has the capacity to truly govern the country. It must invent a crisis itself - one whose ‘resolution’ it can imitate - because resolving a real crisis would mean losing power.

The longer this pseudo-imitative governance continues, and the further the country drifts from real development processes, the more madness we will witness. New, free, and democratic elections are the only thing that will end this imitative surrealism, calm the country, and return it to its natural path of development. There is no time to waste: a regime gripped by the fear of drowning is dragging the entire country toward the bottom,” Salome Samadashvili writes on social media.