Do we like them?

Do we like Irakli Kobakhidze?

Our score: 1 out of 10. He led and defended a law restricting LGBTQ+ rights and headed a government that arrested hundreds of protesters, and no real good turned up to set against it.

Irakli Kobakhidze is Georgia's prime minister and a Georgian Dream man through and through. Al Jazeera reports the decision to freeze EU membership talks until 2028 was thought to have been steered by the party's billionaire founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili. The backstory on Kobakhidze himself is thin in what I could open, so this card judges what he has said and done in office.

The big blow-up came on 28 November 2024, when he announced Georgia would not hold EU accession talks until 2028. Protests followed, thousands faced riot police, and about 300 people were arrested, including opposition leaders, according to Al Jazeera. Officials accused protesters of plotting a Maidan-style revolution, while then US Secretary of State Antony Blinken denounced “brutal and unjustified violence”. Ukraine sanctioned Kobakhidze and Ivanishvili over it.

On the harm test, he's been the front man for the anti-LGBTQ+ push. In 2024 he joined the Church-led Day of Family Purity march, which fell on the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. When the president declined to sign the family values bill, he accused her of putting “pseudo-liberal propaganda” ahead of families. The bill would outlaw gender transition, bar gay and trans people from adopting and void same-sex marriages performed abroad, and Amnesty called it “homophobic and transphobic”.

It didn't stop there. In August 2025 he said Europe's direction on gender and identity was a “destructive ideology” and a “complete catastrophe”, and promised to defend the law. Supporters call this protecting children and tradition. Rights groups and the EU say it strips people of rights.

On the good-person side, he's a hard one to love. In September 2025, after the Dutch ambassador visited a jailed opposition activist, he accused the activist of taking Russian money and said liberals who block streets “take money from Russia's treasury”. The activist denies it is state funding and says it is royalties from her late father's theatre work. I couldn't find any credible evidence of charity or kind acts, so that's honestly the whole list.