The former First Lady of Georgia, Sandra Roelofs, has announced her decision to participate in the parliamentary elections on October 8. She will run for the legislature from the United National Movement opposition party (UNM), which is still chaired by the former president, the governor of Ukraine's Odessa region, Mikheil Saakashvili.
Sandra will compete for the MP mandate in the significant for Georgian politics Zugdidi district. This area, located on the shores of the Inguri River, which divides Georgia and Abkhazia, has played a special role in the modern history of the country since the civil war of the early 1990s. Zugdidi is considered the center of the Samegrelo region, which is home to many influential politicians of the Soviet and post-Soviet period, including the first president of Georgia, Zviad Gamsakhurdia.
Zugdidi residents have always actively supported Mikheil Saakashvili: the UNM candidate won in this region even during the elections on October 1st 2012, which the former ruling party lost. But will the Dutch citizen Sandra Roelofs, who received her second (Georgian) citizenship due to a decree of President Saakashvili, be able to continue this tradition? Her victory would be a landmark, since the victory of his wife would be a triumph for Mikheil Saakashvili, against whom several criminal cases on charges of embezzlement and abuse of power have been initiated in Georgia. Sandra Roelofs has never been considered a political figure. Therefore, by voting for her, a voter would be voting for her husband.
Speaking at a campaign rally together with the leaders of the UNM, Sandra Roelofs said a few sentences in Mingrelian (one of the branches of the Georgian language family), which was greeted by a roar of applause from the audience, but then she made a serious mistake, saying that before she decided to run in the elections, she extracted a promise from her husband that he "won't resort to violence anymore" after returning to power.
This clumsy phrase caused a rapid perturbation on social networks. It turns out that she admitted that Saakashvili resorted to violence, but has promised not to repeat this anymore. Saakashvili's opponents expressed their outrage in the loudest way, but in this case supporters of the former president and his party simply had no answer.
Perhaps the reason for Sandra's mistake was that, although she has carefully studied the Georgian language, she does not know it enough to understand all the nuances of syntax and meanings. Anyway, her victory in Zugdidi is not guaranteed anymore and her defeat would be another political failure for Saakashvili himself.
