New Year’s is the main winter holiday in the post-Soviet world, after the communists took Christmas customs and melded them into the more secular January 1. But Georgia’s mekvle tradition long predates this shift.
With a park, garbage trucks, and now a waste-processing facility, watchdog groups are questioning the city government’s many gifts from politically connected businessmen.
The Georgian government held a mass demonstration partly to claim that its supporters can outnumber protesters, a well-established tactic in Georgia’s political playbook.
Before it took power seven years ago, the Georgian Dream party asked citizens to put their wishes for the country in a box. Now, as the party is girding for critical elections, Eurasianet peeks inside.
The new budget would substantially increase tax revenues and expenditures, but the government’s macroeconomic projections have been received skeptically.
Georgia’s behind-the-scenes ruler has made his most extensive comments to date on Georgia’s ongoing political crisis, also indulging in long digressions into psychoanalysis and motherhood.