It's not often that a prime minister of one country announces his citizenship in another country to justify addressing an international body in a language other than his own.
But when the prime minister is Georgia's Bidzina Ivanishvili and the venue is in Europe, what matters is showing you can fit in.
And so, at his April 23 début before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Ivanishvili, "as a citizen of France . . . ," spoke to the European parliamentarians in French before switching into his native Georgian.
If the PACE deputies, who politely applauded his French intro, found his citizenship odd, it did not register.
After a long and bitter fight to regain his Georgian citizenship, Ivanishvili announced in February that he still is not a Georgian citizen. For that reason, he says, he has not, as previously expected, renounced his French citizenship, which, he claims, under Georgian law, allows him to remain prime minister.
Now it could, conceivably, also provide him with a useful PR tool.
Throwing in a little French, heavily accented as it was, may well have been meant to help make a good first impression at the gathering, and add, along with his profession of French citizenship, a slight punch to the pledges that he will keep Georgia on the track to European and trans-Atlantic integration.
It also perhaps helped show that Ivanishvili -- Georgian by birth, French by choice -- can pull off a Western language just like his political archenemy, the multilingual President Mikheil Saakashvili, far better known to international audiences in the role of democratic crusader.
The two men share other similarities as well. Both have used Europe’s top human rights forum for rapper-style dissing of each other -- Saakashvili's chance came three months ago -- and both have been criticized at home for preventing Georgia from speaking to the outside world with a single voice.
On the domestic front, few care about the prime minister's citizenship, and symptoms of his linguistic identity crisis (dribbling Russian slang into Georgian or vice versa) have not affected his largely positive opinion ratings.
But some, nonetheless, believe that outperforming Saakashvili at international functions is not necessarily an easy task for le premier ministre géorgien, a self-made man with rural roots.
A lengthy hermitage in his futuristic Tbilisi glass castle apparently has left him with little experience in public speaking, resulting in occasional gaffes, thin-skinned responses to critical questions and jokes devoid of punch lines.
With that background in mind, Ivanishvili's Q&A with Europe sparked an outflow of snobbish invectives about him being a simpleton embarrassing Georgia in front of the world. What substantial criticism there was focused on his failing to rise above domestic partisan struggles and trash-talking Saakashvili for an alleged propensity toward authoritarianism.
The prime minister also faced attacks for taking a soft stance on Russia and allowing a dose of self-criticism into Georgia’s dealings with separatist Abkhazia and South Ossetia; an approach described as pragmatism by his supporters and as a sellout by his critics.
But the prime minister's performance, including the display of his inner Frenchman, did not ultimately hold public attention for long. President Saakashvili is off to the US, and, in this land of avid theatergoers, a new show is about to begin.
Giorgi Lomsadze is a journalist based in Tbilisi, and author of Tamada Tales.
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