Civilnet
Liz Fuller
With just five months to go before the October ballot in which he is expected to seek a second consecutive term as Georgia’s president, incumbent Giorgi Margvelashvili has come under renewed attack from the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party. On May 2, Margvelashvili walked out of the Georgian parliament chamber after speaker Irakli Kobakhidze rejected his request for a formal debate on law-makers’ criticisms of the annual address he had just delivered.
Kobakhidze added insult to injury by suggesting as possible factors behind Margvelashvili’s large-scale recourse to pardons of persons serving criminal sentences “an irresponsible attitude, corruption, or a deliberate attempt to undermine law and order.” Margvelashvili’s political secretary Pikria Chikhradze responded by challenging Kobakhidze to turn over to the Prosecutor General whatever evidence he has to substantiate the corruption allegation and demand the opening of a criminal case. http://www.interpressnews.ge/ru/politickru/104102-2018-05-05-06-49-33.html
Margvelashvili and Kobakhidze had repeatedly crossed swords last year as GD singlehandedly forced through parliament controversial constitutional amendments that curtailed the powers of the president and enhanced its own chances of victory in the parliamentary election due in October 2020. That process culminated in GD’s parliament faction overriding Margvelashvili’s veto of the amendments, after which he reluctantly signed them into law.
A philosopher and former rector of the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs, Margvelashvili, 48, served as minister of education from October 2012 until mid-2013, when then Prime Minister and GD founder Bidzina Ivanishvili hand-picked him as the party’s candidate for the October 2013 presidential election, which he won with 62 percent of the vote. Within months, however, Margvelashvili was enmired in a public struggle for power and influence with a second Ivanishvili protégé, Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili.
Giorgi Kvirikashvili, who succeeded Gharibashvili as premier in late December 2015, made a concerted effort to establish a cordial working relationship with Margvelashvili, but the latter’s clumsy handling of the scheduling of the October 2016 parliamentary election led to strains between the president and the ruling party.
As noted above, those tensions were exacerbated by the obdurate stance Margvelashvili adopted with regard to last year’s constitutional reform. First, he refused pointblank to participate in the commission tasked with drafting the amendments because his insistence on co-chairing it was disregarded. Then in March 2017, Margvelashvili launched his own campaign under the slogan “the constitution belongs to everyone” in the hope of tapping into popular resentment at the proposed abolition of nation-wide presidential elections.
Margvelashvili criticized those planned changes again during his annual address to parliament in April 2017. He warned that the constitutional majority (115 of a total of 150 parliament seats) the party had won in the October 2016 parliamentary election created the danger that power will be concentrated in the hands of that party which, he continued, was avoiding dialogue. He also focused on GD’s failure to reduce poverty and raise living standards, noting that “We still have not managed to build a state where no one lives on the streets, where children do not suffer from poverty or the elderly from helplessness, where no one is hungry and no one feels the cold.”
Senior GD members’ collective dislike and contempt for Margvelashvili were reflected in their condescending reactions to that criticism. Deputy Prime Minister Kakha Kaladze, for example, commented that Margvelashvili’s address “contained nothing we haven’t heard before. ” Minister for Refugees and Displaced Persons Sozar Subari complained that many of Margvelashvili’s criticisms were “inaccurate, unfair, and damaging to the country,” the news portal InterPressNews reported, while Prime Minister Kvirikashvili said he would have liked Margvelashvili’s address to be “deeper, more comprehensive, and more objective.”
This year, too, Margvelashvili pulled few punches in his annual address to parliament. He acknowledged progress during GD’s six years in power, but at the same time argued that Georgia has entered a phase in which “power is concentrated in the authorities to the extent that it turns dangerous for democracy, and for the ruling party itself.” He also accused GD of weakening state institutions; failing to establish a more democratic system by taking steps to strengthen the role of the opposition; ignoring popular sentiment by abolishing direct presidential elections as of 2023 and postponing until 2024 the transition to a fully proportional electoral system.
GD law-makers responded by accusing Margvelashvili of going over to the opposition. Kobakhidze for his part declared that he could not remember a single instance over the past five years in which Margvelashvili sought to play a unifying role. (His obligation to do so is enshrined in the Constitution.) Kobakhidze also accused Margvelashvili of abusing the presidential right to pardon prisoners, noting that he has granted 3,500 pardons over the past five years compared with 35 by his Bulgarian counterpart over the same time frame.
Margvelashvili was forced to announce a temporary suspension of such pardons last month after a man he had pardoned last year was arrested and charged with the murder of his step-daughter. http://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=31026 At the same time, he dismissed criticisms of his approach to pardons as “yet another wave of the dirtiest PR.”
Kobakhidze explained his refusal to allow a full-fledged parliament debate on Margvelashvili’s annual address by referring to the parliament statutes which, he said, stipulate that the president has the right to respond to law-makers’ comments and questions only in his final speech. Margvelashvili,for his part, told journalists that prior agreement had been reached on the debate format. He accused GD of restricting his freedom of speech as guarantor of the country’s constitution, then walked out of the parliament chamber. Margvelashvili’s press secretary Giorgi Abashishvili rejected on May 3 as “unworthy and unserious” an alternative proposal by GD law-makers to stage a televised debate on Margvelashvili’s address.
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