Former PM Addresses People Not to Vote for UNM’s Vashadze
By Tea Mariamidze
Wednesday, November 28
Ex-Prime Minister of Georgia, Irakli Garibashvili released a statement regarding the Wednesday presidential election and called on the people not to vote for the United Opposition candidate, Grigol Vashadze, who is the member of the former ruling party the United National Movement (UNM).
In his Facebook post, Garibashvili speaks about the time when the UNM was in power, saying its founder, ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili created “unjust, oppressor and abusive regime” which must not be brought back.
According to the ex-PM, the “UNM anti-national regime” was changed by the now ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party founder and chair, Bidzina Ivanishvili in 2012, adding the results of the first round of the October 28 elections revealed there is a threat the UNM might come back.
“All the dirty rhetoric and misleading propaganda coming from the UNM in fact describes them,” Garibashvili says, adding the UNM brought into the country “the criminals, poverty, torture and oppression of people and loss of the territories.”
“We remember all the crimes committed by him [Saakashvili] against the people. All this was not in the distant past in our country. Criminals, who call themselves politicians, no longer have the right to come back to power,” he added.
He called on the society to “say no to traitor Saakashvili and his anti-national political force.”
Irakli Garibashvili held the post of the Prime Minister from November 20, 2013 to December 30, 2015, when he suddenly decided to resign.
He did not provide the reasons of the resignation, saying only that “timely coming and timely quitting” was of the utmost importance in politics.
The election environment in Georgia is quite tense. The citizens have to make choice between opposition’s candidate Vashadze and ruling GD-backed presidential candidate Salome Zourabichvili.
In the first round, Zourabichvili gained 38.64 percent of votes and Vashadze-37.74%.
