The Georgian parliament on its way to the impeachment of Georgia’s functioning president is a weird juridical image in itself, but it is also fun to watch. In the first place, we have never had a chance in the history of our freely and democratically living Sakartvelo to witness a political event of this nature and dimension. Secondly, it is a fortunate moment in the social life of our people, given that we are gathering some moths and maturing as a nation, that, with the help of this kind of political experience, we can become a modern nation with a bunch of western ideas in our ancient mind and some civilized practices under our senescent belt. And thirdly, we can’t help but react to the breaching of our decreed rules because, in the ideal scenario, nobody stands above the law in a pluralistically organized society like ours.
Life is so packed with various of funny vicissitudes! In the happy pre-election era, this president was remarkably tame, nice, loyal, pliable, malleable and as easily led as a sheep. She would do anything the government desired and prompted her to undertake. The lady looked so tolerant to any step taken by the ruling power that the opposition hated her with all its revolving guts. She was literally led by hand by the government through all those complicated socio-political labyrinths of the Republic, presenting her to the doubting public as a fresh and only mana from the sky, to work as the best peacemaker in our overstrained and polarized society. It was truly difficult to listen to thousands of oppositional epithets in her address, often sounding like the roughest possible language and ear-swirling diatribes this nation had ever heard before.
And all of a sudden, her shockingly unexpected metamorphosis fell on our poor heads. As if changed at a single swish of the magic wand, our lady president, elected in unbearable societal pains and with enumerable public fits and starts, neutralized by the ruling party, turned into a vested enemy of Georgia’s current government, for which presidential animosity was the last thing it could imagine. Her unforeseen preponderance towards the viciously radical opposition was taken like thunder from the sky, but it became next to impossible for the government to stop the avalanche of the president’s lashes of criticism, directed at the surprised administration like poisoned arrows. Notwithstanding the constitutional ban on the president’s foreign policy activities without the governmental nod, the lady insisted on independent interaction with foreign political leaders, thus flagrantly breaching the main law of the land, all this having ended in the logical finale of bringing the recalcitrant head of state to the highest political legal case, called impeachment.
The whole thing is so trivial if not facetious! There is a system for managing this country, based on law and discipline, and if we call ourselves a serious state, guaranteeing our peaceful and successful development, then the officially and democratically adopted rules for ruling the country have to be honored and observed, subduing all personal endeavors and ambitions to remain in history as a man or a woman of consequence. Even if she is right in her attempts to do some good for this nation, it should all be done within the framework of what the entire world calls law. If we deviate from the functioning law and we wink at the fact, then we are draining all our efforts to westernize ourselves down the tubes. On the way to joining European civilization, the number one condition to reach the destination is an unequivocal observation of the officially adopted code of our social, political and economic behavior. Otherwise, what’s the difference between the soviet socialist Georgia and the one we are enjoying today?
On the whole, it is good that we are capable of reacting to the president’s deviation from the constitution the way we are reacting. This is the advent of a new era. This is the beginning of a new approach. What else is the freedom of political thought and democracy we are so adamantly building in this country? Isn’t America doing the same exact thing to its current president?
Op-Ed by Nugzar B. Ruhadze
