He added: “I also want to congratulate the Georgian government on that while enforcing pro-European politics, you didn’t allow becoming a second Ukraine. We greatly value the PM’s devotion to this idea, and I’m confident Georgia will be well-suited to join the EU by the end of this decade.”
Orbán was echoing Georgian Dream’s preelection narrative that Western countries wanted to drag Georgia into Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine. The right-wing Hungarian leader has positioned himself as a European ally to Putin, meeting the Kremlin chief in Moscow this summer and slow-walking EU sanctions against Russia and military aid for Ukraine.
The Georgian ruling party had positioned itself as a guarantor of peace, warning that opposition parties were the puppets of a so-called global war party.
Saturday’s vote in Georgia — widely regarded as an “existential” election, decisive in determining whether the country’s foreign policy tilts toward the EU or Russia — was marred by violence. International observer missions including the OSCE’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights have expressed concerns over vote-buying.
Iulian Bulai, head of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe delegation, expressed concerns about the electoral conditions “given the cases of vote-buying, the widespread climate of pressure, and party-organized intimidation before and during the elections.”
But Orbán said he had reviewed Hungarian observers’ reports, which were “positive in all aspects.”