The tug-of-war over Forbes billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian citizenship may now be approaching a dénouement, but a national probe into the financing of his Georgian Dream opposition coalition still raises concerns among watchdog groups about how far Georgia’s commitment to competitive parliamentary elections this fall actually goes.
While some NATO members may be skittish about the alliance’s continuing involvement in Afghanistan, Georgia remains firmly committed, and will soon rank as the mission’s largest non-NATO supplier of troops.
Campaign finance reform in Georgia may potentially threaten freedom of expression and donor funding for non-governmental organizations, civil society activists say.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s recent fall from power garnered lots of media attention in Georgia. Like Italy, Georgia seems to fancy outsized political personalities. And like Italy, it suffers from high unemployment. But unlike Italy, Georgia has hit on a quickie political solution for this problem. It’s called television.
For as long as the republican form of government has existed, elected representatives have had to fight the temptation of letting private financial interests influence their political decisions. Georgia is not immune from this tendency.
In the United States, the embattled postal service is resorting to drastic cost-cutting and sell-offs to stay solvent. In the Republic of Georgia, the post office is taking a different route to fiscal soundness – running the lottery.
The educated public learned that renowned Georgian theater director Robert Sturua had been dismissed from the post of artistic director at the country's leading Rustaveli Theater in Tbilisi from the maestro's own curt posting ("I've been fired") on Facebook late on August 16.
Faced with a growing outcry over the arrest of three prominent photographers on espionage charges, the Georgian government on July 13 took action to counter criticism that a desire to stifle a press freedom is a major motivation for the spy case.
Georgia’s proposed election code changes, the result of a deal between the governing United National Movement and opposition parties, seem to dim the hopes for genuinely competitive parliamentary and presidential votes in 2012 and 2013 respectively, some Georgian civil society activists fear.
