Victory at municipal elections on May 30 allowed Mikheil Saakashvili
to break out of the international isolation
Victory at municipal elections on May 30 allowed Mikheil Saakashvili
to break out of the international isolation he was in since August 2008.
During this period the Georgian leader paid no visits to European
capitals and met with no European or American leaders (excluding his participation in summits and other common gatherings).
The opposition has always considered this "isolation" one of the most
important arguments for a change of the authorities. Directly after the elections, where the United National Movement governing party
won with 60% of the vote and Giya Ugulava, the president's ally, was elected mayor of Tbilisi, invitations started to arrive to the president from Western capitals.
Saakashvili's main opponent, ex-parliamentary speaker Nino Burjanadze is
blaming the opposition for its refusal to boycott the elections, saying they helped Saakashvili to get back international legitimacy. "If the opposition had refused to participate in the elections, Saakashvili would still be a persona non grata across the whole world. Yet, directly after the elections, eulogistic articles about Saakashvili started to appear in the press" - Burjanadze claimed in aninterview with local media.
Above all, the members of the presidential administration underline
the fact that the president paid an official and not a working visit to France on June 7-8. No Georgian leader had been honoured like this before.
Besides this, the Georgian authorities think it is no coincidence that
Saakashvili's visit to France came at the same time as talks between Nicolas Sarkozy and Vladimir Putin. Tbilisi is convinced that one of the main topics of both meetings was the fulfillment of the Medvedev-Sarkozy agreement, and in particular the withdrawal of Russian troops from South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
The official part of the visit started on Tuesday although Saakashvili had arrived in Paris two days beforehand and took time to visit the tennis where he and spoke to the Spanish queen, who set next to him for a few minutes. It turned out that he has been invited to Spain as well.
Before the reception ceremony in Paris, Saakashvili met the minister of ecology and energy of France, Jean Louis Borloo. He and his Georgian counterpart Alexander Khetaguri signed a memorandum on investment in the sphere of energy and tourism.
Borloo has called Georgia "a regional leader with great potential in the sphere of energy, ecology and tourism" He stressed that the president of France himself had advised him to prepare the memorandum. Working goups will be created in the framework of the project to consider concrete investment projects.
A source in the administration of the Georgian president reported to VK that the role of Georgian troops in NATO operations in Afghanistan was also discussed.
Besides this, Georgia expressed its concerns about French plans to
sell the Mistral helicopter carrier to Russia.
In the framework of the visit, a special program was prepared for the
first lady of Georgia, Sandra Rulovs, who was born in the Netherlands. She spoke to the wife of the French president. After the official ceremony, Saakashvili and Sarkozy remained on the terrace to discuss the situation in Abkhazia and the South Ossetia.
Speaking to journalists, Saakashvili expressed optimism. At the end of the
Visit, old Georgian movies were shown, for example, Tengiz Abuladze's
Lurja Magdani, which won the Cannes prize in 1956.
Georgi Kalatozishvili, Tbilisi. Exclusively for VK
