The Speaker of the Georgian Parliament responds to the Open Budget Index 2023 survey on the social network X.

“At the intersection of reality and fiction in politics, thank god the world of numbers and hard facts still exists. There are rock-solid facts, buttressed by the truth, statistics, numbers, onto which torrents of disinformation break up.

In such a sea of deliberate lies and purposeful hearsay, we have just learned that once again, in the Open Budget Index 2023, Georgia is number one among the 125 countries in the world. This Index also estimates budget oversight and inclusivity of citizens, where Georgia is number five. We made a significant progress overall, moving up by 16 steps in the ranking in the past three years alone. Overall, since 2012, when Georgian Dream came to power, Georgia moved from the category of countries with limited budget transparency up to the group of states with fully transparent budgets.

Can anyone explain, if Georgian government is indeed ‘Russian’, ‘corrupt’, and ‘inept’, how come our budget is MOST transparent in the world? This is the question where it becomes clear that our opponents, inside and outside of Georgia, live in an impenetrable bubble created of their own making, where facts do not matter and only mutually shared lies constitute the reality.

Luckily, it is the people who matter most – our people, our population, our voters – who make the ultimate decision who runs the country, by voting in free elections. And these people judge the reality by themselves, not by believing what some nontransparent NGOs or opaque politicians have to say but what they see with their own eyes”, - writes Shalva Papuashvili.