TBILISI (Reuters) -Georgia has gone backwards in its bid to join the European Union, an EU diplomat said on Tuesday after what he called a "devastating" update from Brussels on its membership prospects.
Pawel Herczynski, the EU ambassador to Georgia, said the South Caucasus country was further away from joining the bloc than when it first became a membership candidate in 2023.
The European Commission said in a report on Tuesday that the EU could welcome new members as early as 2030 as it praised Montenegro,
Albania, Ukraine and Moldova for their progress on the reforms needed to join.
But it accused Georgia of "serious democratic backsliding" and said the former Soviet republic was now considered a candidate country "in name only".
"The findings of the report are unfortunately devastating for Georgia's European aspirations," Herczynski told reporters in Tbilisi.
"Georgia is not on the trajectory to become an EU member state, neither in 2030 nor later."
Once among the most democratic and pro-Western of the successor states to emerge from the Soviet Union, Georgia has turned increasingly authoritarian since the outbreak of war in Ukraine and has deepened economic ties with neighbouring Russia.
The ruling Georgian Dream party has cracked down on opposition politicians, jailing several, while police have ramped up arrests of protesters attending regular anti-government demonstrations.
Georgian Dream said last year it was freezing accession talks with the EU, although the government says it still wants Georgia to join the bloc while preserving what it calls its traditional Orthodox Christian values.
The speaker of Georgia's parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, said the EU's report showed the bloc was trying to subject Tbilisi to "ideological and political dictates".
"Blackmailing and pressuring Georgia will not work. We are not going to give up. Georgia will continue to prepare the country for EU membership," Papuashvili was cited as saying by the Interpress news agency.
Georgian Dream said last week it would file a lawsuit to the Constitutional Court to ban the country's three main opposition parties on the grounds they posed a "real threat to the constitutional order".
The three parties have rejected the planned lawsuit as politically motivated.
(Reporting by Lucy Papachristou;Editing by Andrew Osborn and Mark Trevelyan)
