(Bloomberg) — Georgia’s Salome Zourabichvili has vowed to continue as the country’s president and not respect the ruling party’s plan to replace her, saying the October parliamentary elections were illegal.
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“There is no official parliament and therefore no official president or inauguration. That is why I remain as your president,” Zourabichvili said in a televised address on Saturday after violent clashes between protesters and police in the capital, Tbilisi.
“I want to tell the public that since the president, who is the only independent and legitimate institution left in the country, national unity has also been achieved here,” he said.
Georgian police and special forces cleared protesters and barricades from a main street in Tbilisi after clashes sparked by the ruling party’s announcement this week that it would delay European Union membership talks until 2028.
The police said that 107 people were arrested on Saturday morning. 13 journalists were injured, he said earlier. The total number of people arrested is unclear, according to the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association. The Special Investigation Unit says it has started an investigation into police officers who are preventing journalists from doing their job.
While Zourabichvili blamed the escalation of violence on the police leadership, Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze, a member of the ruling party, blamed “radicals and their foreign bosses” for the clashes at a press conference on Saturday.
“We ask foreign bodies to stop encouraging violent and groundless protests that promote the disunity of Europeans in Georgian society,” he said. “Georgia is a country with strong institutions that is moving forward on the path of European integration.”
Kobakhidze said that a repeat of Ukraine’s Maidan, a reference to the protests in Kyiv in 2013 when then-President Viktor Yanukovych refused to sign an association agreement with the EU and was rejected by popular protests, was impossible in Georgia.
The ruling Georgian Dream party this week chose Mikheil Kavelashvili, a former soccer player and current lawyer, to be its presidential candidate in the Dec. 14 election to replace pro-European Zourabichvili. The president, whose main role is a ceremony, will be chosen by the country’s Electoral College which includes 300 people, including all members of parliament, under the constitutional changes that come into effect this year.
Protesters say they are planning new demonstrations Saturday night in new locations in the capital of Georgia.
Georgian Dream, founded by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, won October’s parliamentary election to extend its 12-year rule by four years, according to the Central Election Commission. Opposition MPs who support the pro-European charter are boycotting the new parliament, complaining of electoral fraud.
Weeks of rallies followed the election, when law enforcement twice dispersed the opposition camp in central Tbilisi. Opposition groups have called on supporters to protest again on Friday.
Georgia applied to join the EU in 2022, along with Ukraine and Moldova, but has yet to formally agree to open the multi-year membership negotiation process.
–Courtesy of Yuliya Fedorinova.
(Updates with the president’s comments in the first three paragraphs)
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