Georgian Dream chair and ex-Prime Minister Gharibashvili announces exit from politics

The chair of Georgian Dream and former Prime Minister Irakli Gharibashvili has announced his departure from politics. Speaking at a briefing in the ruling party office on Friday, Gharibashvili said he had ‘honorably fulfilled his duty’ to the country, the people, and the party, and that he would remain a supporter of the ruling team.

Gharibashvili said he had made the announcement amid  ‘speculations’ surrounding his political future.

In his words, ‘today, Georgian Dream has finally consolidated into a unified and strong political force’. He repeatedly praised the party’s founder and current honorary chair, Bidzina Ivanishvili, describing him as a ‘guarantor of peace and stability in the country’.

‘Under [Ivanishvili’s] leadership, Georgian Dream helped the country and society avoid major threats and saved the country. At the same time, it brought tangible progress across all areas and sectors’, he said.

‘Against this backdrop, I believe that the honorable mission entrusted to me by the party’s founder and our team has, one could say, been fulfilled. I no longer see the need to remain as party chair or in politics in general’, Gharibashvili added.

Part of Ivanishvili’s team from the early days, Gharibashvili was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs in 2012, in the very first government formed by Georgian Dream after coming to power.

Later in 2013, he succeeded Ivanishvili as prime minister, a position he held until the end of 2015 before stepping away from public politics. He returned in 2019 to serve as Defence Minister. In 2021, following the resignation of then‑Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia — now an opposition politician — over internal disagreements, Gharibashvili once again took over as head of government.

In 2024, he stepped down as prime minister and became the chair of Georgian Dream, a role he held until his latest resignation. He was succeeded as prime minister by Irakli Kobakhidze, who remains in the position.

At his farewell press briefing, Gharibashvili once again launched a sharp attack on the former ruling party, the United National Movement (UNM), claiming that if Georgian Dream had not defeated UNM in 2012, ‘today, we would no longer have a country’.

‘Thank God, fortunately, under the leadership of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the fight to save the country ended with the victory of our party, our people, and our country. We finally removed from power a regime that was the enemy of its own people, a traitor to national interests, an oppressor, and a perpetrator of violence’, Gharibashvili said.

In his words, no position had ever been his ‘ultimate goal’, and from now on, he will continue to ‘serve the country’ from a different role — primarily in the private sector.

‘I remain a loyal soldier of both Mr. Bidzina Ivanishvili’s team and our country’, he added.

At the end of the briefing, a journalist asked Gharibashvili why he hadn’t mentioned Kobakhidze even once in his farewell speech, and whether the two had worked well together within the party.

‘These are just speculations’, Gharibashvili replied, adding that ‘there are many leaders in our team, and I didn’t think it was appropriate to list them all in my statement’.

‘When I became prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze was the party chair. We had an absolutely harmonious relationship’, Gharibashvili stated.

Gharibashvili was replaced by Kobakhidze just a month after Ivanishvili, the party’s billionaire founder and former prime minister, formally returned to politics as the party’s ‘honorary chair’.

Speculation about a possible rift between Gharibashvili and Kobakhidze — as well as claims that Gharibashvili was replaced by Kobakhidze as prime minister at Ivanishvili’s behest — has surfaced from time to time. The party representatives have typically denied any internal discord.

At the start of the ongoing protest wave in December last year, some media outlets claimed that Gharibashvili wanted to leave the party and was physically assaulted by fellow party members as a result. In a later TV interview, Gharibashvili denied plans to leave and dismissed the allegations of physical violence as a ‘disgusting lie’, saying he had sustained a minor injury while exercising.

At the end of Friday’s briefing, Gharibashvili was also asked whether he might return to politics — possibly even as part of the opposition. He ruled out the idea of switching sides but said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when it comes to a potential political comeback.

Like Kobakhidze, Gharibashvili was known for his confrontational stance toward political opponents and critics, including the media.

His second term as Prime Minister coincided with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a marked intensification of Georgian Dream’s conspiratorial, anti-Western narratives, as well as a sharp rise in political homophobia.

Among these were theories about a ‘global war party’ that allegedly sought to open a second front in Georgia, dragging the country into war with Russia.

During Gharibashvili’s time in office, in 2023, Georgian Dream and its allies introduced the controversial foreign agent bill for the first time — a law that, despite initial pushback, was ultimately passed the following year under Kobakhidze’s premiership.

Gharibashvili also began pushing for legal restrictions on  ‘LGBT propaganda’, an anti-queer initiative that was formally proposed and later passed by Georgian Dream months after his resignation.

It remains unclear who will succeed Gharibashvili as party chair.