The speaker of Georgia’s parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, said on October 7 that the ruling party lawmakers would move to impeach the pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili. The move would be ahead of a parliamentary election on October 26, a year after a previous impeachment effort failed.
In a press briefing, Shalva Papuashvili said the charges against the president concerned visits overseas that, he said, had not been authorised by the government. These are the same accusations which were levelled in the previous impeachment last year.
President Zourabichvili, a Paris-born former French diplomat of Georgian descent, last week met the presidents of France, Germany and Poland, along with senior European Union officials, during a trip to Western Europe.
The ruling Georgian Dream party and its allies currently lack sufficient votes in parliament to impeach her. Papuashvili said he hoped the measure would be passed after the election of a new parliament.
Though elected in 2018 with the support of Georgian Dream, Zourabichvili, whose powers are mostly ceremonial, has since become a foe of the party and its powerful founder, billionaire ex-prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili.
In recent weeks she has been attempting to broker pacts among Georgia’s divided and fractious opposition parties, aimed at ousting Georgian Dream at the polls.
The EU said last week it had suspended all high-level contacts with the Georgian government over its “anti-Western and anti-European narratives”.
Though Georgia has been broadly pro-Western since independence from Moscow in 1991, foreign and domestic critics have accused Georgian Dream of seeking to sabotage Tbilisi’s long-standing goals of EU and NATO membership and reorient the country towards Russia.
Georgian Dream says that it wants Georgia to join the EU and NATO while also avoiding conflict with Russia.
According to opinion polls, Georgian Dream remains the country’s single most popular party, though it has lost ground since 2020, when it won almost 50 per cent of the vote and a narrow parliamentary majority.
