The next ‘fateful’ elections in Georgia will be held on October 8th. The citizens of the country will elect the parliament, which will be vested with a constitutional right to form the government. According to the Basic Law, the president remains a symbolic figure with an authority ‘’to press the flesh’. Therefore, the major players raise the stakes as the election day is approaching.
There are three main ‘fronts’ at the upcoming elections, the victory at which will be an important and in many ways defining event:
- the capital of the country, Tbilisi
- The Zugdidi district, where the ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili’s wife and the head of the Georgian opposition party ‘United National Movement’ (UNM), Sandra Roelofs, runs for office
- The Autonomous Republic of Adjara on the border with Turkey, where the main battle is expected both during and after the elections.
According to the established tradition (including the experience of the Rose Revolution in 2003), a post-election period in Georgia can be more important than the elections themselves. Recently the leader of the ‘Alliance of Patriots’ party, Irma Inashvili, warned about it. According to her, Saakashvili ‘is preparing another coup in the country’: in early October, he will leave Odessa temporarily, where he holds the office of the regional governor, arrive in the Turkish city of Trabzon, locate in the hotel at the Turkish-Georgian border, and will lead the ‘revolutionary actions’ from there.
Irma Inashvili
The authorities in Ankara and Tbilisi have not commented yet the warning of the influential Georgian politician. Though Mikhail Saakashvili has not confirmed plans to turn a hotel at the border near the Sarpi check point into the headquarters of the Rose Revolution-2, he noted in an interview with the Georgian journalists, with whom recently he talks more often than with the Ukrainian ones, ‘If Ivanishvili (the former prime minister and founder of the ruling party ‘Georgian dream’, a billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, VK) goes against the will of the people, it will be tantamount to get on the way of an oncoming train -the train will pass in anyway, and Ivanishvili will remain on the rails.’’
This statement was made by Saakashvili during a telephone call from Odessa at a mass rally in the center of the capital of Adjara. Continuing in the metaphorical style, Saakashvili said, ‘the misfortune of the past four years will stop and everything will be left behind as a dark nightmare’, as quickly as the rain pouring that day stopped.
The number of people participated at the rally in the Ajarian capital was a little less, than it was expected by the UNM, but much more than the ruling party ‘Georgian Dream’ expected. A rally in Batumi confirmed that the UNM remains a major and quite influential opposition force.
The political temperature was raised by the former first lady. According to Sandra Roelofs, claiming for the deputy mandate in the Zugdidi district, "Mikhaill isn’t not afraid of anything, and his return to Georgia is inevitable.
This warning almost coincided with a sensational press conference of the ‘Free Zone’ organization, which is considered a youth wing of the United National Movement. The activists of the youth movement said that during a recent meeting with Mikhail Saakashvili in Ukraine, the leader of the opposition party ‘studied’ the technology of the ‘post-election struggle’ with them, including blocking of buildings under the pretext of falsification of the voting results and in order to make the authorities use force.
The leaders of the ‘Georgian Dream’, who appeared on the way of the irrepressible Saakashvili’s oncoming train, only shrug and call timidly an attempt of the governor of another state to make a revolution on the background of the diplomatic calm as ‘an unprecedented case in the world.’’
