Georgian Dream Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze acknowledged that the social employment programme paying 300 lari per month was, in reality, fictitious employment and did not address unemployment.
“The reduction in employment is entirely formal and has one specific reason: there was a programme replacing social assistance, and 30,000 people can be said to had been fictitiously employed. They were counted as employed, although in reality they were still receiving social assistance.
That was the situation. The programme was abolished, which was an absolutely right step because it was fictitious, and this led to a formal decrease in the number of employed people. We abolished an ineffective programme,” Kobakhidze said today, on 25 May, in comments to journalists.
The fact that the 300-lari employment programme was exploited by Georgian Dream as an administrative resource during the pre-election period was also discussed by citizens themselves. For example, in 2023, people employed under the social programme told Batumelebi that they were engaged in fictitious work and that it did not change their social conditions.
“I am in Georgian Dream, I work as a coordinator,” people “employed” under this programme were saying in various municipalities.
Georgian Dream first spoke about abolishing the social employment programme after the 2024 elections. By 2026, the programme was abolished.
Despite statistical data showing a decline in employment in Georgia, and the public speaking about poverty, unemployment, and difficult social conditions, Kobakhidze still attempts to convince society that the country’s economy has grown by several billion over the past 2–3 years.
“Today, the National Statistics Office published the 2025 poverty rate, which has been decreased to 7.1%. This means that in 2025, against the backdrop of 7.5% economic growth, 90,000 citizens escaped poverty.
Since 2020, Georgia’s economy in lari has grown from 50 billion to 105 billion, and in U.S. dollars – from 16 billion to 38 billion. We are not only first in the region, but also across Europe in terms of economic growth.
In 2020, our population’s net income was 13.3 billion lari, and today this figure exceeds 33 billion lari. These are the taxes our citizens have paid into the budget,” Kobakhidze says, adding that despite 7% economic growth in the country, 280,000 citizens still remain in poverty.
