Democracy Leader 2017

Democracy leader of this year is a journalist, civic activist and Telavi Democracy School alumni. Archil, one of the “citizens”, managed to raise important issues for public discussion and protested overtly the steps he deemed undemocratic. For years, he has been working as a journalist for regional media outlets, while during last years he served as a public servant at Telavi local municipal body. He was actively supporting decentralization of local self-governance. From 2017 onwards, since it became known that the decision on abolishing the self-governing city status of Telavi was made, he started and organized active civil protest. Despite being public servant, he vigorously protested the facts of merging municipalities and abolishing self-governing city status of Telavi. Archil’s idea was “civic protest sheep’, which he nominated for participating in the local self-government elections in 2017.