Even when it tries to, Georgian politics fails to be dull.
On the face of it, everyone expected that the coming presidential election in Georgia on October 27 will be straightforward and uninteresting. It marks the final exit of the flamboyant Mikheil Saakashvili almost ten years after he came to power. The post of president is being trimmed down under the new constitution and will lose most of its executive functions. By contrast, the favorite to get the job, the candidate of the governing Georgian Dream coalition, Giorgi Margvelashvili was not even well known in Georgia earlier this year.
And yet, the candidates are as if conspiring to give the poll a lot more drama than might have been expected a few weeks ago. The first surprise is the strong performance of the woman aptly described by Michael Cecire as “Nino ‘Nine Lives’ Burjanadze.”
Burjanadze was one of the three leaders of the 2003 Rose Revolution, later speaker of parliament and in that capacity twice served as interim president of Georgia. In the last few years, she has made a sharp pivot away from her former positions. She now stands on a platform that calls for a much more aggressive campaign against her former colleagues from Mikheil Saakashvili’s government and a much closer rapprochement with Russia.
Burjanadze has too much baggage to win her the election—most Georgians will not forgive her their public meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2010. But her favorability ranking leapt between June and September 2013 from 21 to 33 percent in polls commissioned by the National Democratic Institute. So Burjanadze is now competing for second place with the candidate of the former ruling party, the United National Movement, David Bakradze.
And that could be interesting because if both poll large numbers of votes they could force a second round. That is something that Margvelashvili has said is unthinkable. So unthinkable that he has tied himself up in a knot of his own making by insisting that if there is a second round of voting he would not participate in it. In other words, if Margvelashvili polls 49 percent of the vote on Sunday, Georgia will wake up to a big political mess on Monday.
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