If new parliamentary elections are not held, participating in local elections will legitimize the regime, end the Rustaveli protests, and creating a new battlefield will take years, writes Zurab Girchi Japaridze, leader of the Girchi-More Freedom party, on his Facebook page.

“Regarding local elections – if new parliamentary elections are not held (with a new administration and the chance for fair judicial review of electoral disputes) and all political prisoners are not released, the result of participating in local elections in October [2025] will be the following:

- it will legitimize the numbers produced by the Central Election Commission for the October 26 elections;
- it will legitimize the torture of hundreds of people by the regime in early December;
- it will legitimize the many-year sentencing of dozens of politically detained captives;
- it will legitimize all recent regulations restricting media, political activities, civil society and protests;
- international political isolation will begin to collapse and the regime’s rule will be legitimized at a rapid pace;
- the Rustaveli protests will end, creating a new battlefield will take years.

As for the counterarguments:

- Europeans will pressure us and we’ll have to participate anyway – this is a “trauma” carried over from Charles Michel. There will be no pressure. The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe has already said that these elections should be postponed.

- We’ll prepare better now and win in at least some places – no matter how many places you win, the regime will write whatever numbers it needs. We’re playing football in a football tournament, they’re playing rugby against us, all the referees are theirs. UEFA tells us this isn’t football, this isn’t how refereeing works, and if you play like this, you can’t participate in our tournaments. Regime says, this is football, we know better than Europe what football is, and they break our bones. At this point, talking about developing better tactics to win is not serious.

- We won’t win, but we’ll strengthen our position in local councils, begin dismantling the regime from there. We’ve seen how the opposition strengthened in parliament after the stolen 2020 elections and what result this brought – creating a facade of democracy in the country, which bought time for the regime and, as a result, today we have much less freedom than we had 4-5 years ago.

- We won Tbilisi on October 26, we’ll win the mayoral elections now and then… regime will not concede Tbilisi or any other important point under any circumstances. It “won’t show weakness”. Such is its nature. It will write whatever it needs. It will implement whatever changes to the electoral system it needs to ensure against risks.

There’s a Hungarian guy, Laszlo, standing on Rustaveli [Avenue] every day. He can tell you what [Viktor] Orbán has done in this regard. That’s how it looks from my perspective”, - writes Zurab Japaridze.