Georgian president calls on schools to join protests

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili has called on the country’s schools to back pro-EU protests, after hundreds of university lecturers expressed support for the ongoing demonstrations.

Zourabichvili has refused to leave office after Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze froze EU accession talks.

“After universities, it is the turn of schools to express their solidarity with the protests, all over Georgia,” Zourabichvili wrote on social media on Monday.

Last month, hundreds of university lecturers signed a letter backing the demonstrations and encouraging their students to take part. It is unclear whether Zourabichvili is calling on minors and teenagers to take to the streets, or on their schools to issue a declaration of support.

Protests have been raging in Tbilisi since Thursday, when Kobakhidze announced that he would freeze EU accession talks until 2028, due to Brussels’ “constant blackmail and manipulation” of Georgian internal politics.

Kobakhidze’s Georgian Dream party, which won nearly 54% of the vote in parliamentary elections in October, favors stable relations with both the EU and Russia. Pro-Western opposition parties and Zourabichvili, who was born in France, have refused to recognize the results of the vote. Zourabichvili’s mandate ends this month, but she has refused to leave office until the elections are re-run.

More than 200 people have been arrested at protests in Tbilisi, while more than 100 police officers have been injured, according to the Georgian Interior Ministry. At a demonstration outside parliament buildings on Sunday night, demonstrators shot fireworks and hurled molotov cocktails at heavily armored riot police.

Kobakhidze has slammed the rallies as an “attack on the constitutional order in the country” and blamed the civil unrest on “EU politicians and their agents.” He further accused the West of trying to orchestrate a coup similar to the US-backed Maidan revolution that toppled Ukraine’s government in 2014.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has also compared the protests to the Maidan coup, telling reporters on Monday that Moscow sees a “direct parallel” between the events. The demonstrations, he added, have “all the signs of an attempt to carry out an ‘orange revolution’,” referring to an earlier US-backed scheme to overturn election results in Ukraine.

The US has responded to Kobakhidze’s freezing of accession talks by canceling Washington’s strategic partnership with Tbilisi, while EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has warned that Brussels is considering sanctions against Georgia.