When EU Norms Become Political Weapons: Media Freedom and the Limits of Europeanization in Georgia

Georgia has been an EU candidate country since December 2023. In 2024, the Georgian parliament passed the so-called foreign agent law, which was modelled on Russian legislation. Reporters Without Borders documented more than 600 attacks on journalists in ​​a single year. Both the ruling party and the opposition claim to support Europe. However, Georgia’s candidacy was effectively terminated in 2025, due to the country’s democratic backsliding. This compels us to ask why EU pressure is failing to protect media freedom in Georgia. 

At the 2026 Tbilisi Book Fair, which took place from April 23–26, a fundraising campaign called Sinatle Media – Light Media was quietly collecting donations. The initiative unites Georgia’s independent media outlets and their supporters in a single, urgent effort to keep reporting alive. Speaking to us for this blog post, a Georgian journalist with more than thirty years of experience in independent reporting describes the situation. “Many of our colleagues keep working without being paid just to let their platforms survive,” she says. The money, she explains, dried up after the 2024 Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence came into force. 

What makes this particularly striking is how the law was described. The Georgian Dream government did not present it as a measure against the press. It presented it as a measure for transparency, invoking the very language of accountability, transparency, and sovereignty that the EU promotes. The journalist is blunt about how this framing lands on the ground: “There has never been any other kind of understanding of the law but a leverage of suppressing independent media and civil society in Georgia.” The transparency argument, she adds, was always propaganda; organizations that received foreign funding had always done so legally and openly. “International criticism did not have any practical effect inside the country exactly for the reason that it’s a political issue and they cannot interfere in domestic politics.” 

Research on Georgian political discourse shows that both the ruling Georgian Dream party and the opposition publicly claim alignment with EU standards, yet use that claim to delegitimize each other rather than as a framework for governance. Georgian Dream did not openly reject EU media norms when passing the Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence, but were able to exploit the EU’s conditions and policies to serve their own interests. The collapse of media freedom in Georgia is therefore not a story of norms being defied, but a story of norms being captured and weaponized by all sides at once.  

Everyone is Pro-EU 

To understand why media freedom cannot be assured in Georgia, it helps to start with what appears, on the surface, to be a point of consensus: no one in Georgian politics has openly declared themselves anti-European. Georgia seems to be pro-European on the surface. Professor Stephen F. Jones, historian of modern Georgia at Ilia State University and founder of the Program in Georgian Studies at Harvard University, notes in an interview conducted for this blog post that this broad consensus is historically unprecedented: ‘There has never really been any polemic before about Europe as friend or threat — this is new. Previously, everyone on all sides was convinced Europe was good, and a goal to aim for.'”  

However, under the surface is a deeper issue. Research on Georgian political discourse reveals that both the government and the opposition are using EU integration to attack each other, rather than as a unifying goal for governance. Rather than a single source for democratic reforms, EU norms of media freedom have become a means asserting of legitimacy. Thus, EU standards have become a battlefield rather than a set of rules, with neither side following accepted standards and accusing the other of violating EU principles.  

The Foreign Agents Law: Liberal Words, Russian Logic 

The Law on Transparency of Foreign Influence is one of the main events revealing this instrumentalization. In 2024, the Georgian Dream party used the language of EU standards when passing the law through the parliament, claiming that the law is to manage the accountability of media funds and promising to ensure transparency. The party has defended basing the law on the American Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), yet FARA primarily pertains to media organizations lobbying on behalf of foreign governments. In Georgia, however, legal entities and actors are labelled foreign agents only because they receive funding from abroad. If institutions receive 20 percent of their budget from abroad, they are automatically registered, labelled, and must receive government approval to receive any future funding. 

Speaking to us for this blog post, a Georgian journalist is clear about what this means on the ground. “Transparency has never been a real issue when it comes to CSOs and media organizations. It’s part of government propaganda.” The rhetoric accompanying the law makes the intent plain: targeted organizations and individuals were publicly described by ruling party leaders as “foreign agents,” “extremists,” and “leverages of foreign masters.” The cumulative effect of this legislative wave is visible to anyone working in the field. “Civil society is practically dead,” says Professor Jones. “The media is almost completely under government control, there are a few independent outlets like OC Media and Civil.ge, but they don’t reach the majority of the population.” 

The Venice Commission, OSCE/ODIHR, FIDH and Transparency International Georgia have criticized the law, demanding its repeal. Scholars who have studied similar laws in Europe and Central Asia argue that these laws are not about transparency concerns but rather tools to consolidate power and neutralize civil society. In the Georgian case, it also serves geopolitical goals and serves the Russia’s strategic interests in the region. 

Why More EU Pressure Will Not Fix This 

In January 2025, the EU suspended visa-free travel for holders of Georgian diplomatic and service passports. By November 2025, the European Commission’s annual enlargement report declared Georgia a “candidate country in name only,” concluding that it had “further derailed from the EU path.” In March 2026, the Commission went further, adopting a regulation to suspend the visa-free regime for Georgian diplomatic passport holders entirely. Georgian Dream’s response to each of these measures was consistent, with Prime Minister Kobakhidze dismissing the November 2025 report as containing “distorted facts” and described it as reflecting a “tragic situation within European bureaucracy.”  

Partly, this is structural. Georgia lies at the crossroads of geopolitical conflict and the government has become adept at making use of the situation. Russia and China offer alternative sources of support that carry no democratic conditionality. As Professor Stephen F. Jones explains: “The anti-European statements of the government make sense for them, because integration with the EU would end the dominance of Georgian Dream.” Russia and the Georgian Church, he adds, are actively reinforcing this dynamic, promoting a defense of traditional values that frames European integration as a cultural threat rather than a political aspiration. The EU’s conditionality has not disappeared, but over the past years, powerful alternative options have emerged that make it far easier for Georgian Dream to ignore it.  

The situation continues to deteriorate. Georgia has fallen 37 places in two years in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index. In April 2025, a new Foreign Agents Registration Act came into force, replacing the 2024 law’s administrative fines with criminal penalties. Directors of media organizations now risk up to five years in prison if the state alleges they acted on behalf of “foreign principals” and failed to register. In the same month, amendments to the Law on Grants introduced a requirement that all media outlets and civil society organizations obtain explicit government approval before accepting any grant from a foreign donor, a provision that in practice gave Georgian Dream the power of veto over independent funding. Amendments to the Broadcasting Law, also passed in April 2025, banned broadcasters from receiving any foreign funding and handed the National Communications Commission, which is a body with close ties to the government, new powers to intervene in editorial content, assess factual accuracy, and revoke broadcasting licenses. Legal incidents against journalists nearly doubled in 2025 compared to the previous year. 

A Different Kind of Engagement 

Georgia’s experience does not mean that EU media freedom norms are irrelevant or non-existent. This is because norms with no political basis can be seized, emptied, and used to benefit precisely the powers they were designed to rectify.  

The situation is further complicated by the information environment in Georgia. Studies suggest that Russian-based disinformation narratives have led to the loss of trust in the Western institution among the population, and that the effect is most pronounced in places where the level of distrust towards the domestic political elites is already high. When citizens are torn between a government using the EU language as a weapon and an opposition that reflects it, and when the rest of the information space actively erodes trust in European institutions, the EU’s policy of formal conditionality for Georgia is pushed to its limits. 

What is required is neither more statements nor deeper EU involvement in Georgian domestic politics. Instead, what is needed is an honest reckoning with the structural limits of EU engagement in a society where, according to Caucasus Barometer 2024 data, full support for EU membership stands at 58% among younger Georgians and 43% among those over 55—the legacy of a political culture of deep suspicion towards foreign engagement. The Georgian case suggests that the effectiveness of EU norm promotion depends less on the clarity of the norms themselves than on the domestic political context in which they land.