Message from @mattforney
Discord ID: 633055224684216320
they want to keep skimming off the top and avoid serious issues
during the presidential election last year, Bidzina Ivanishvili (the capo of Georgian Dream), used one of his charitable foundations to buy up the debts of 400,000 people
which is a big number (the pop is only about 3 million)
Doesn't that raise questions?
it was a last ditch effort to win the election since the government candidate and UNM's candidate were tied
it raised questions but not enough for people to care because Salome Zurabishvili (the Georgian Dream candidate) ended up winning
she's a doofus
an expatriate who speaks Georgian in a French accent
you see the different mentality compared to Fidesz: they pulled out all the stops to get a clearly mediocre person into power
Are they trying to be self-defeating or to keep nice with the opposition?
To be honest, fidesz also have huge blind spors, but they are ruthless vs the opposition when they act
like I said, they have no real ideology and just want to make money, so they overreact any time there's a threat to their income streams
they think throwing concessions at people will get them to go away
they're all carrot, no stick
Then there is no future there, although I think no european country has any future
For different reasons they are all doomed
a good comparison would be to Viktor Yanukovych, who basically tried to be everyone's friend
and got run out of power by ideological fanatics
I'd say Georgia has a bit further to fall at least re: poz
one of the few major things Georgian Dream did was rewrite the constitution like Fidesz did
of course, this is the FSU, and that kind of thing can be overturned with a "plebiscite" where a bunch of votes just materialize out of thin air
Yeah, it is nice that it is there but that can change anytime
pretty sure Ukrainians didn't expect that Euromaidan would end with Azov Battalion veterans marching in pride parades, and yet it happened
Is the media also on such bad shape over there?
I mean, of course very few people would look up what the news are in Georgia
it's worse in some respects
I didn't even know about the flying ban
there aren't any Germans buying shit up like they did in Poland, but there's also no state-run media apparatus like in Hungary
there's the pro-government news channel and the opposition news channel
the pro-government paper, the opposition paper
etc.
the opposition media outlets are profitable because they aren't being drowned out with state money
or forcibly sold to friends of the government
Georgia is also physically smaller and the population is concentrated in less space than Hungary
No OpenSocieties money?
so the media in Tbilisi, for example, covers about half the country, while Batumi covers the other half
so everything's dictated by urbanites
there's some Open Society money but not a huge amount
Georgia is a low priority for Soros
but the opposition are happy to parrot that line anyway because they're whores