Ruling party head hopes for EU candidate status in December, vows to tell public "details" in case of negative outcome

Irakli Kobakhidze, the head of the ruling Georgian Dream party, on Wednesday said he hoped Georgia would receive the European Union membership candidate status later this year, and added the authorities would "have to explain to the public more details than we have done before” in the case of the bloc's decision result in it not granting the country the status. 

“We hope that we will receive the candidate status. [But if we] assume it does not actually happen, the process will continue and, of course, the task of European integration will remain on the agenda. We will wait for next year, the year after that", he said.

"Hopefully, the war in Ukraine will have ended before then. Of course, as soon as the war in Ukraine ends, we will immediately be looked at differently by those forces that look at us drastically differently today”, Kobakhidze told Imedi TV.

If the unfair decision [from last year on the candidate status for Georgia] is repeated in December, in this case we will have to explain to the public more details than we did before. We were more careful about [some] issues, [and] of course we will have to be careful about [some] issues in the future, but we will tell the public more details about this topic”, the ruling party official noted.

Kobakhidze explained the details would involve divulging reasons that had led to the negative decision on Georgia’s candidate status in 2022, and added “we will need to open the cards to the public more” in the potential repeat of the scenario this year.