About fifty Georgians living in Hungary demonstrated on Thursday near the site of the CPAC. The protesters were protesting against their prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, who has been in office since February, as well as the foreign agents law, which is stirring up a big storm. Several signs read No to Russian Law.
The purpose of the Georgian (more recently Georgian) government’s draft law on the “transparency of foreign influence”, created on the Russian model, is to monitor and limit the activities of foreign NGOs in Georgia. According to the law, all NGOs and media that receive more than 20 percent of their operating costs from abroad should be registered with the authorities, otherwise they would be subject to heavy fines.
In Georgia, there have been serious street movements against the draft law for months, and in mid-April the parliamentary debate on the law escalated to violence. The agency law is opposed by both the United States and the European Union.
On Thursday, Orbán Irakli Kobakhidze, who was elected in the colors of the sovereignist party Grúz Alom, received him for the first time in Karmelita. According to MTI, the meeting discussed the possibilities of deepening Hungarian-Georgian political cooperation and the state of Georgia’s EU integration process.
Later, in his CPAC lecture, Irakli Kobakhidze talked about the ongoing struggle for them to be able to maintain traditional values in their country. He said that big countries also struggle with dangers, and liberalism threatens the identity of countries and peoples, and he also called uncontrolled migration a danger.
Viktor Orbán also spoke at the conference, the prime minister said, among other things, that Hungary “remained a conservative island” in the progressive-liberal ocean. We reported on Orbán’s speech in detail in this article.
