My dear friends, congratulations. In 45 minutes, the year will begin in which we will fully wake up in a dictatorship — because an illegitimate, pro-Russian force that has seized the state trampled the Constitution a year ago and, in an accelerated process, passed a law claiming that we are no longer allowed to stand or protest on sidewalks.

Here I want to remind everyone — especially my friends who come out to large demonstrations — that the path from authoritarianism to dictatorship is not walked only by the oligarch who imposes all this, but is also enabled by a society that does not respond. So it is time to wake up, to become alert, and to stand up. If you don’t want tomorrow for the air in your rooms to be shut off, and to be forced to live in the forms and appearances that please Bidzina, then it is time to wake up and come out to Rustaveli to protest.

Because apparently I and my friends are now forbidden even to stand on the sidewalk and speak. So the time has come to join the protest, to mobilize, and to prove to Georgian Dream that we are a united society — a society that is fighting a force that is anti-democratic and that violates every rule and every norm befitting a democratic state.