U.S. Ambassador Meets CDM Leader in Party’s Office

U.S. ambassador to Georgia, John Bass, visited Christian-Democratic Movement’s (CDM) headquarters on November 2 and met with CDM’s leader MP Giorgi Targamadze.

“We have a frequent communication with our American friends. We will discuss two major issues: the first is ongoing political processes and how to turn a threat of confrontation and radicalization into a chance for our country to have a multi-party political system and elections in a fair environment, which will lead the country to progress, which will bring the [Georgia] closer to the West and will not throw us into the past,” MP Giorgi Targamadze said before the meeting.

“Our American friends are always trying to promote such political processes in our society, which will bring us closer to multi-party political system, where there will be no political players, who will have absolute power to totally destroy their political opponents,” he added.

The visit of the U.S. ambassador to CDM’s office comes less than two weeks after he, along with a group of other Tbilisi-based foreign diplomats, met with billionaire-turned-politician Bidzina Ivanishvili in the latter’s headquarters. Many commentators at the time described arrival of group of foreign diplomats at the Ivanishvili’s headquarters as a symbolic move showing importance of Ivanishvili’s personality in the Georgian politics.

When the U.S. Ambassador was asked on October 23 at the public TV’s weekly talk show, Accents, whether he saw any symbolism in this rare move by group of foreign diplomats to arrive at an individual politician’s office, John Bass responded: “People tend to read into specific events… a degree of symbolism; frankly from my perspective it was not there.”

“We talk to many different people across the society and we talk with them at many different places,” he added.

Ambassador Bass also reiterated in the same talk show, that the U.S. was not supporting any individual politician or a political party in Georgia, but the Georgian people and strengthening of the country’s democratic institutions.

He said that in this context he and his colleagues from the Tbilisi-based diplomatic corps were interested to hear directly from Ivanishvili about his views, “just like we do with other people across the political spectrum in Georgia”.