In just the last three years alone, 160,000 women have left the country. This means that hundreds of thousands of children are growing up here without their mothers. If anyone has borne the heaviest burden of the authoritarian regime over the past 12 years — of economic hardship, injustice, the absence of democracy — it has been women and the children they were forced to leave behind.

The only alternative that Bidzina Ivanishvili announced back in April — when he told us that he would take away the elections, and with the elections, our homeland — was emigration. And today he is offering us exactly that… emigration. He offers this to those of us who do not want to live in Russia and to those who do not want to remain in a country without prospects.

Throughout Georgia’s history, the main line of struggle has always run through fighting Georgian women. And at the head of this movement too — there have always been, there are, and there will be women. It is crucial to understand that today Bidzina Ivanishvili has driven the country into a dead end, and the only way out of this dead end is a movement for change, a movement toward transformation.

What “Georgian Dream” wants most today is to stop this movement. But we must remember: this movement will not stop until new elections are held in this country.