Presidential “Faux-Pas”
OP-ED
President Margvelashvili is being threatened again. This time with losing his post, with the Chairman of Parliament saying that if Mr. Margvelashvili “continues making politically incorrect speeches,” he might be “left jobless” by the ruling party. By which he means changing the constitution- the law on direct election of the president in the country.
Discussions about the rule on presidential elections were announced during the previous parliament, when MP from the majority, Vakhtang Khmaladze, of the Republican Party, started talking about changing it in 2013. This political impromptu went nowhere, mostly because Georgian Dream (GD) did not have the constitutional majority at the time, not to mention that MPs from the majority believed that parliament electing the President only served to strengthen the Republican Party, especially when the billionaire leader of the coalition, Bidzina Ivanishvili, had made clear that he believed Republican Vakhtang Khmaladze to be the best successor of Mikheil Saakashvili. When Ivanishvili changed his mind and named Giorgi Margvelashvili, then Minister of Education, as his presidential candidate, the constitutional change was forgotten. However, GD returned to the issue once Margvelashvili disappointed the billionaire’s hopes. And so GD began to hatch a revenge plan.
It began with a dispute between President Margvelashvili and former Prime Minister Garibashvili over who would make a speech in the UN in New York and who would sign the Association Agreement in Brussels. This slowly grew into an attempt to evict the President from his presidential palace. Things got so bad that the now Head of Parliament Irakli Kobakhidze accused the President of loving comfort and craving luxury. Why loving comfort was regarded as a crime is hard to explain, especially considering that the President doesn’t even own a home in the capital- he has a small house in the region of Dusheti. Apart from loving comfort, he was also accused of loving alcohol. The main accuser in this regard was not Irakli Kobakhidze but MP Manana Kobakhidze. “Generally, he loves hard alcoholic drinks, he adores whiskey, martini and I believe he’d had a bit too much,” she declared when discussing the smile on the President’s face during a briefing in the Avlabari Residence about the informal governance in the country. “If there is pressure, informal powers, and the county is falling apart – what are you laughing about when you are president? When the President is holding a briefing, he should say something valuable, but today the President confused me,” Manana Kobakhidze said.
Apparently, leaving the President without a job is the second round of the fight which the Chairman of the Parliament initiated recently. Last week Kobakhidze, who is also the Head of the Constitutional Commission, declared that “If the President continues to make politically incorrect statements, we might even start thinking about switching to the indirect presidential election model from next year.” Mr. Kobakhidze’s statement that day followed the comment that the President made to Rustavi 2: “We are facing not a deep rethinking of the Constitution or its contents by the Constitutional Commission, but a decision made explicitly about a specific politician,” Margvelashvili said, by which he was referring to himself.
Zaza Jgarkava