Alliance of Patriots of Georgia

The party was established in December 2012,[12] by founders including Soso Manjavidze, Davit Tarkhan-Mouravi and Irma Inashvili. Giorgi Lomia is political secretary.[10] The party leadership also includes former warlord Emzar Kvitsiani, a figure that has attracted significant controversy.[13] The Alliance party was based on the Resistance Movement, a group fiercely critical of the former ruling party, the United National Movement.

The Alliance of Patriots maintains anti-Turkish rhetoric, warning of Ankara's alleged designs on the Adjara region, has called for delaying free trade with the EU, and argues that the pursuit of NATO membership is fruitless, as NATO's leading members have themselves made clear that Georgia has little prospect of accession.[10]

The Alliance party has a television channel, Obieqtivi, run by Inashvili. Davit Tarkhan-Mouravi has a series on the channel in which he lectures on the Bible and Orthodox Christianity. A mathematician, he served in earlier administrations as "head of the state department for information technologies in the early 2000s, and as head of the customs department for several months in 2003."[10]

In the 2014 local elections, the Georgian Dream coalition, including the Republican Party, gained 50.80%; they have been leading the government since 2012. The UNM gained a nationwide party-list vote in 2014 of 22.41%. Nino Burjanadze and her United Opposition coalition gained the third best results in the local elections, with nationwide 10.22% in the party-list vote.[10] Burjanadze revived a Eurasianist rhetoric, which is supported by Russia, and the campaign was "fueled by massive influxes of what was likely Russian money."[8]

The Alliance of Patriots of Georgia party received 4.7% of the aggregate vote, meeting the required threshold of 4% to qualify as a political party, and making it eligible for future state funding for elections. It ran in a party-list contest for proportional Sakrebulo seats in 47 of a total of 71 municipalities and cities. In 30 jurisdictions, its party-list voting exceeded 4%, making it eligible for seats on 30 local councils, including that of Tbilisi.[10][14]

Inashvili finished fourth in the mayoral election in Tbilisi with 5.4% of the vote; the party won two seats in the Tbilisi City Assembly. In addition, Alliance of Patriots of Georgia mayoral candidates qualified for run-off elections against Georgian Dream (GD) candidates in the cities of Poti and Ozurgeti; and Alliance candidates qualified for second-round runoffs for municipal executives in the municipalities of Lanchkhuti and Khulo.[10]

In April, 2018, one of the leaders of the Party, Emzar Kvitsiani, publicly admitted working with Russian special services (notably with GRU) purposefully making false, erroneous and propagandistic statements on their behalf.[15]

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