Salome Zourabichvili is a threat to Georgian democracy

I spent thirty minutes watching current Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili’s interview with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell on their popular ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast. It was both illuminating and deeply disturbing. My main conclusion was that the biggest threat to democracy in Georgia is Zourabichvili herself, and that Georgian authorities should tread carefully to avoid bungling the end of her Presidency on Sunday 29 January.

Salome Zourabichvili is very obviously driven by a deep-seated hatred of Russia dating back to her grandparents’ decision to go into exile in 1921, in the teeth of the Red Army occupation of Georgia. It was clear that she has made it her life’s ambition to right the wrong of Georgia’s occupation, by which I inferred she meant to eradicate any hint of hated Russian influence.

Salome has a childish and romanticised historical view of Georgia rooted in her affluent childhood in central Paris and attending the Georgian church. Like a child, she was mendacious and slippery in her response to the question of her Georgian citizenship, describing herself as always having been Georgian through speech and song at home. In fact, she only gained Georgian citizenship on March 20 2004, awarded by then President Saakashvili, while she was still France’s serving Ambassador to Georgia.

The reason for Zourabichvili’s sudden citizenship was to allow her to become Georgia’s Foreign Minister, a role she carried out for a year and a half, for most of that time still employed by the French Diplomatic Service. If that sounds familiar to you, former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko’s first Finance Minister in 2014, Natalia Jaresko, was a former State Department official, as is former President Viktor Yushchenko’s wife, Kateryna. Noone screams ‘democracy’ more, after all, than western officials put in charge of countries that they want to rescue from the tyranny of independence.

By becoming Georgian Foreign Minister while still a serving French diplomat and French citizen, she described a sense of exacting ‘revenge’ on behalf of her parents. So, it was apparent that she has spent her whole life in a private fury about the Russian menace and developed an almost fanatical determination to right what she considers to have been an historical wrong. A political opportunist, she has aligned with and dropped most political parties in Georgia on her way to the top, including Georgia Dream itself.

Like a French Greta Thunberg without the global fanbase, Zourabichvili has turned her fury more recently towards righting the so-called injustice imposed on Georgia by the 26 October election which she describes as having been stolen. She is entirely dismissive of the weak support lent to her cause by the OSCE monitoring mission, which found that the Georgian elections were generally well organised, even if there were discrepancies in a number of areas. Or to the fact that most European Heads of State have soft-pedalled on outright condemnation of the Georgia Dream party since that time.

Her position rests almost exclusively on the notion that the wrong party won, and that that must by definition be anti-democratic. That – in her words – the elections themselves were ‘really a referendum’ about Georgia’s right to choose Europe over Russia. And that the fact Georgia Dream won must axiomatically indicate that the result was fiddled.

An elderly woman, reaching back to her high-society upbringing in Paris with her Nazi sympathising relatives, she describes a young generation of Georgians who have lived and ‘studied abroad’ and are desperate to choose Europe. And yet, statistics from UNESCO show that only around 10000 Georgians study overseas in tertiary education each year, or around one quarter of a percent of the population. Her idea of the modern Georgian citizen is that of an urban rich kid, who may well yearn for a European future for their country after skiing trips to Chamonix.

That chauvinistic and narrow view of an appropriate Georgianness doesn’t represent the median of a Georgian society in which GDP per capita is just $8200. While the elections on 26 October were not perfect, a very clear pattern emerged in which rural Georgians, who make up 40% of the population, voted overwhelmingly in favour of Georgia Dream.

As has been the case since the election night itself on 26 October, Salome Zourabichvili has provided not a single scrap of evidence of Russian interference. Indeed, at the end of the interview, she conceded that Bidzina Ivanishvili himself is not even a direct agent of Russia. Bizarrely, she even described Sergei Lavrov as extremely professional. Her protest is entirely ideological; that any right-minded Georgian must necessarily have wanted to vote against Georgia Dream, and, by implication Russia, although she has never articulated persuasively how the two are linked. And that by choosing Georgia Dream, voters have either been got at or are plain stupid and not worthy of the right to vote.

But her position is also astonishingly self-interested. Narcissistic and drunk on her own propaganda, she just wants to cling to power. Come what may, Salome Zourabichvili is determined to remain President of Georgia, even though her constitutional term expires on Sunday 29 December. At first, during the interview, as if she has a grand plan that she only intends to reveal at the weekend, she refused to be drawn on her future. But by the end of the she announced that ‘I will certainly be President this time next week for the Georgian people’.

So having heaped scorn of the democratic failings of the electoral process in her adopted country, Salome Zourabichivili plans to mount a coup d’etat, at least in publicity terms, by insisting that she remains the rightful ruler of Georgia. What she undoubtedly wants is to create a huge scene in which she suffers a deathless martyrdom involving her being dragged out of town and exiled, bullied and bruised. Georgian authorities, which appear so far to have managed the heavily orchestrated protests in Tblisi with restraint, should continue to do so in ushering her out of power in a firm, yet polite way, so that Georgia’s incoming President, Mikheil Kavelashvili, can assume office.