Author: Alexei Vlasov, exclusive to VK
“I have heard that our northern neighbor is happy, and Vladimir Putin, whose armed forces occupied 20 percent of our territory, actively praises our elections ... I can tell him that it is premature happiness, "- Saakashvili said last week in a speech at the congress of the European People's Party in Bucharest.
Arguing about the moral and political resources for the opportunity to proclaim the power of Mikhail Saakashvili's team, experts tend to believe that it will have to come to terms with the new political realities and think about what brought the defeat of the United National Movement. In fact, a combination of factors played a role here.
Firstly, a part of the population has become tired of Saakashvili's politics. He is certainly associated in Georgia with successful reforms, in particular the reforms of the Interior Ministry and the Customs Service, but it was just a nice picture for the outside world, while in Georgia potential protest grew. And this is not just about the people who are affected by the change. It was not only corrupt people or the elderly, dissatisfied with the Westernization of Georgia, who voted against Saakashvili. Those who voted against him also included the so-called "swamp" - the people who decide to whom they will give their vote just at the last moment.
Secondly, there was the wisely-designed campaign of Bidzina Ivanishvili, especially the timely broadcast video with the scenes of torture in a Georgian prison. The showcase of Saakashvili's reforms was not as blissful as had been said repeatedly by the President himself. In addition, the people from the inner circle of Saakashvilii turned out to be involved in the scandal, from the former Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili to Bacho Akhalaia, who was Interior Minister at the time the controversial video was made public.
Thirdly, Washington probably found that Saakashvili had been in power long enough. Realizing that Ivanishvili would not manage to dramatically turn the course of Georgia, e.g. in the direction of Russia, but would perhaps maintain the Euro-Atlantic rapprochement of the country with Brussels and NATO in a more restrained way, Washington felt it was more profitable in this situation not to bring Saakashvili down, but to refuse the support that would allow him to stay in power.
In addition, it seems that at the final stages of the campaign, which Ivanishvili conducted more successfully than his main political opponent, Mikhail Saakashvili started to get nerves. He was certainly an eccentric politician, but his eccentricity was somewhat exaggerated with the help of simple information technology. In today's world any politician can be presented as an eccentric clown. His emotionality impressed a part of the Georgian electorate, because Saakashvili was a real person, not bureaucratic, accessible and able to communicate with the Georgian voters face to face: not an armchair politician. His eccentricities are only an external image. Of course, he happened to get nerves in critical situations. This was evident during the events of August 2008. So it seems that at some point during the last election campaign he was nervous, since it was understood that the ruling party would obviously fail.
As for the reforms undertaken by Saakashvili's team, we need to remember that Georgia received significant funds for conducting them from outside. It was not modernization relying on domestic resources. Georgia is a small country, therefore the money invested in the economy created the appearance of success, but it was not a success for everyone. Saakashvili has failed to solve both the problem of unemployment and the problem of the gap between rich and poor. Thus, social modernization in Georgia, despite the ratings of the world agencies, has not been completed. Instead, there was a nice picture of transparent police stations and cultural, perfectly-working customs services.
But this is only the surface of the Georgian reforms. If you go one step below, you understand that the scenes of torture in a Georgian prison were not an exception. Five to six years are not enough to build a fundamentally new model of a Westernized country from the state in which Saakashvili found Georgia at the moment of Shevardnadze's resignation. However, the path of Westernization helped Saakashvili to position himself as a politician of a new type. Not for nothing, though Georgia is not a member of the EU, during each of his speeches Saakashvili defiantly put the EU flag next to the Georgian flag, indicating that this is precisely the future that awaits Georgia. These benchmarks seemed quite acceptable, especially for the younger generation, born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, not nostalgic for the Soviet Union due to natural causes and educated in Western universities, for the "golden youth" of Georgia. They are a contrast to the rural people who want to understand where they will sell their wine, who will be the buyer of cheese, etc. Saakashvili preferred answering these difficult questions only with the ceremonial opening of a regular winery or a festival of Georgian cheese. But this is not the best platform for dialogue.
However, for the U.S., the main sponsor of the Georgian reforms, it is now important that if the figure of the Georgian leader has changed, then the policy is still "correct." Saakashvili himself may now be able to calmly tell success stories of Georgian reforms in his lectures somewhere at Western universities.
