Ruling Party Tells Opposition to Agree on Public TV Board’s Vacant Seats

Parliamentary Chairman, Davit Bakradze, said the ruling party would endorse those candidates for seven vacant seats in public broadcaster’s board of trustees, which the parliamentary and non-parliamentary opposition would agree on.

“In case of opposition’s agreement, we, as the majority, will support the nominees agreed by the opposition,” Bakradze said at a press conference on December 3.

A total of 24 applicants made their bids for seven vacant seats. According to the procedure the President has now to select total of 21 candidates and nominate three for each vacant seat; so how the candidates will be grouped (three for each seat) is also important in the selection process. Then the Parliament will vote for each of the three candidates and the one who garners most of the votes will become the board member.

Davit Bakradze also said on December 3, that the list of candidates selected by the President had already been submitted to the Parliament. But Civil.Ge failed to obtain the list from the Parliament and according to the President’s administration no list of candidates had been sent to the legislative body yet. 

Bakradze’s statement about the ruling party’s readiness to give a go-ahead to the opposition parties’ nominees if they would agree, was made in response to a letter sent to the Parliamentary Chairman by five non-parliamentary opposition parties.

In the letter Conservative Party; Movement for United Georgia; Party of People; Georgia’s Way and Women’s Party urge the Parliamentary Chairman and the parliamentary minority to “depoliticize” appointment of seven board members and to say no to appointments based on political party affiliations.

The five parties call on the parliamentary minority and the ruling party to allow “non-governmental sector to endorse all seven candidates”.

They also said that if the parliamentary minority would refuse this offer, then the five parties would support those candidates, which were nominated by Media Club, a group of media activists, which was set up by journalists and media researchers with a goal “to depoliticize the public broadcasting.”

In the list of 24 applicants seeking seats in the board there are five nominees lobbied by Media Club. These are: a media researcher Nino Danelia; editor of Liberali magazine Shorena Shaverdashvili (both are also members of Media Club); Iago Kachkachishvili, a pollster and a sociologist; Lela Gaprindashvili of the association Women’s Initiative for Equality and Lia Chakhunashvili, dean of the Caucasus School of Media at Caucasus University.

The five non-parliamentary opposition parties also say in the letter that they deserve to have the right to nominate five candidates, while leaving two others for the parliamentary minority group.

MP Levan Vepkhvadze of Christian-Democratic Movement (CDM), which is a leading party in the parliamentary minority, told Civil.Ge on December 3 that he was against of such proposal – five nominees for non-parliamentary opposition and only two for the parliamentary minority.

He also said that his party was against of endorsing some of the candidates lobbied by Media Club. Vepkhvadze, however, declined to specify. He also declined to specify which applicants out of 24 where CDM’s favorites. One of the applicants is Nodar Sarjveladze, a chairman of the Christian-Democratic Institute, a think-tank set up by CDM.

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