Daily Beat: September 1
The ruling party’s move to launch impeachment procedures against President Salome Zurabishvili has dominated the news. The ruling party controls 84 MPs and can count on a few more from satellite parties but does not have 100 necessary to impeach. Yet, there is no love lost between Zurabishvili and the opposition party with the most significant representation, the United National Movement (UNM), whose imprisoned leader, Mikheil Saakashvili, she refuses to pardon. This makes Zurabishvili’s position politically precarious. Still, the day was not without compensation for the embattled president: her Instagram post thumbing her nose at the Georgian Dream from a European fast train has earned her the dubious honorific of “Slay Queen” from Gen-Z political newbies.
Still, the motive of impeachment is most significant: the Georgian Dream railed at Zurabishvili’s solo European trip to garner support for the EU candidacy and announced on the eve of her planned meeting with the EUCO President, Charles Michel. Although already used to such antics, some European MPs have been indignant.
Bubble storm
A series of social media posts by a scholar of modern history, Beka Kobakhidze, in which he hit out at the nationalist interpretation of modern history, has been uniting the unlikeliest of political foes in a collective condemnation. Dr. Kobakhidze also wrote opinion pieces for this newspaper (here and here) and his recent social media blogs have touched upon the sensitive subjects of hushed up backstories of Abkhazia conflict and the self-serving marasmus of the Georgian school of history.
Tu quoque?!
Senior Scholar of the Carnegie Endowment, Tom de Waal, penned an article titled “The Orbanizing of Georgia.” The usually measured scholar rehashed the laundry list of Georgian Dream opponents – attendance at the conservative CPAC, refusal to join some EU sanctions, bromance with Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Erdogan, and Azerbaijan’s Aliev. While not new, de Waal’s piece is a bellwether of a hardening consensus about the nature of the Georgian Dream in Brussels and beyond.
