TBILISI, July 7. /TASS/: Several hundred of protesters in Tbilisi have again marched on Saturday evening from the country’s parliament to the home of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the founder and chairman of the ruling Georgian Dream - Democratic Georgia party, demanding to sack the country’s foreign minister Giorgi Gakharia.
The rally was broadcast live by the Rustavi-2 TV channel.
"The maximum period during which all this [rallies] will continue is until the 2020 parliamentary elections. We will not continue beyond that date. I don’t know the format of this campaign in the future, but we have our plan," the event’s moderator Misha Mshvildadze said.
Participants started to gather outside the Georgian parliament building at 19:00 local time (18:00 Moscow time) and then marched several kilometers to Ivanishvili’s house.
Leaders of opposition parties United National Movement and Movement for Liberty - European Georgia took part in the rally. When the crowd reached its destination point, anthems of Georgia and the European Union were played. After that, the participants decided to end Saturday’s rally, but to gather again outside the parliament on Sunday evening.
This is the opposition’s second march to Ivanishvili’s house. During the first rally, on June 27, participants demonstrated symbolic ‘yellow cards’ and demanded Gakharia’s resignation.
A series of protests in the Georgian capital began on June 20, when several thousand protesters gathered near the national parliament in downtown Tbilisi, demanding the resignation of the interior minister and the parliament’s speaker, and tried to storm the building. The protests were sparked by an uproar over the Russian delegation’s participation in the 26th session of the Inter-parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy (IAO).
On June 20, IAO President Sergei Gavrilov opened the session in the Georgian parliament. Opposition lawmakers were outraged by the fact that Gavrilov addressed the event’s participants from the parliament speaker’s seat. In protest, they did not allow the IAO session to continue and tried to storm the parliament under anti-Russian slogans. Riot police units had to use rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons to disperse the crowd. The unrest left 240 people injured, over 300 were detained but later released.
