Georgia PM offers no way out of EU accession deadlock in Euronews interview

President is here. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze insisted his government remains very committed to joining the European Union, but offered no convincing explanation of how he intends to revive the country's stalled accession bid. Instead, he accused Brussels of political blackmail. Georgia applied to join the bloc in 2022. ...alongside Ukraine and Moldova, but the Commission initially withheld candidate status, citing insufficient progress on democracy. It was extremely unfair, because there was no ground for that. Later, the European Commission publicized its assessment, its scores, about Georgia and other countries, and Georgia was doing much better than Moldova, for example, or much better than Bosnia, but these countries received the candidate status. In November 2024, Belize announced it would not seek to open accession negotiations before the end of 2028. Kobakhidze again shifted responsibility to Brussels. If the European Commission would decide to open accession talks for Georgia, we would immediately join it. But finally, it was not us, but it was the European Commission which decided to suspend the political dialogue with Georgia. Asked what concrete steps he would take to break the deadlock, the Prime Minister offered little beyond a willingness to hold a public discussion with the Commission.