Republicans Want GD to Turn into ‘European Style Coalition’
The Republican Party, one of the six parties in the ruling Georgian Dream coalition, said time has come for the GD to turn into “a European-style coalition” with formalized decision-making system, otherwise, it suggested, that although the party will remain in the coalition, it will have to speak out publicly whenever it disagrees with the coalition.
Republicans have nine lawmakers in the Parliament, who are part of the GD ruling majority group, dominated by MPs from Georgian Dream-Democratic Georgia, party formed by ex-PM Bidzina Ivanishvili and now chaired by PM Irakli Garibashvili. Republicans faction in the Parliament also includes parliamentary chairman Davit Usupashvili, who was Republican Party’s chairman for eight years before being replaced by Khatuna Samnidze in 2013.
The party said in a statement, laying out its “political agenda for next two years”, that two years after coming into power the GD coalition has “successfully” reached an important stage with “dismantling” UNM’s “authoritarian regime”, winning 2013 presidential and 2014 local elections and signing of the Association Agreement with the EU.
In next two years before the 2016 parliamentary elections, the Republican Party said, the GD coalition has to tackle “fundamental tasks, which are vital for ensuring Georgia’s progress and development.”
Among those five key tasks the party lists need for “strengthening the institutional foundations of multiparty democracy,” which, it said, requires achieving “broad consensus” on electoral system and achieving “environment of tolerance for a diversity of political and other viewpoints”.
GD has to provide for “faster-paced development of democratic institutions”, which, the Republican Party said, requires “improvement of a constitutional system of checks and balances”, as well as institutionalization and “de-personalization of governance”.
Providing economic system focused on fast growth, the Republican Party said, will require “more clarity and consistency in the government’s economic strategy” and gradual shift of priorities from meeting “short-term social needs to an accelerated pace of economic growth.”
The party said that providing “effective state governance” will requires a staffing policy based on professionalism and “elimination of political or other forms of discrimination”.
For ensuring security of the country, the Republican Party said, it will be required to intensify integration into NATO and “timely” implementation of measures offered by the Alliance at the Wales summit, as well as “coordinated functioning” of state agencies responsible for security and foreign policy and the elimination of the practice of “public recrimination” on these issues between high officials.
“The fact that many of these problems have been inherited from the former United National Movement government cannot continue to serve as a self-justification for the Georgian Dream coalition,” the Republican Party said. “In order to successfully carry out the next stage of political tasks, the coalition’s own system must be refined. The coalition is made stronger by being more democratic, by being a coalition in which the partner parties’ interests are taken into account.”
The Republican Party said that in order to achieve it and “to improve efficiency” of the coalition, it offers to its partner parties two possible options: “To either make the coalition – which was created with the aim of unseating the previous authorities – into a European-style coalition, which would form the basis of a coalition agreement completely redistributing responsibilities and clearly and practically uniting them on a shared political platform, or alternatively to make it the kind of coalition in which the [coalition member] parities are guaranteed [with] the freedom to position themselves according to their own ideologies and to make clear their differing positions within the framework of agreements reached within the coalition.”
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