The ruling Georgian Dream party has announced they will begin new impeachment proceedings against President Salome Zourabichvili, citing her official visits abroad without the government’s permission.

At a press briefing on Monday, the Speaker of Parliament, Shalva Papuashvili, said the party would appeal to the constitutional court before the 26 October parliamentary elections. If the court rules against Zourabichvili, her impeachment would still require the approval of 100 of 150 MPs; Georgian Dream currently has the support of only 83.

It comes a year after the ruling party’s previous attempt to impeach the president fell short of the number of MPs required to pass it. 

‘Zourabichvili continued to violate the constitution; she was in France, Germany, Poland, and Belgium last week without the government’s consent’, Papuashvili claimed during the briefing.

Article 52 of Georgia’s Constitution states that the President can exercise representative powers in foreign relations only with the consent of the government.

Papuashvili said that after the Constitutional Court approved her impeachment, the next convocation of parliament would remove Zourabichvili at the first parliamentary session following the elections.

Zourabichvili was elected with the support of the ruling party in the 2018 presidential elections, but in recent years, relations between the two have become strained.

Zourabichvili has become an outspoken critic of the ruling party’s growing authoritarianism, using her presidential veto to slow the passage of a number of key pieces of legislation.

In September 2023, Georgian Dream began impeachment proceedings against Zourabichvili for the first time after she embarked on a series of official visits to meet with senior European officials, despite having been denied permission to do so.

The following month, in October, Georgia’s Constitutional Court found Zourabichvili guilty of violating the constitution, which allowed the ruling party to hold a parliamentary vote on impeaching the president. However, they were unable to secure the required support from opposition MPs.

At his briefing on Monday, Papuashvili said that last year’s ruling by the Constitutional Court had made clear to foreign countries and organisations ‘the president needed the government’s consent to visit’. He went on to chide European leaders for continuing to meet with her.

‘After this decision, hosting Salome Zourabichvili without the mandatory consent of the Georgian Government, as well as being an act of intentional disrespect to the Georgian people and its constitutional arrangement, is a violation of the principle of non-interference in a country’s internal affairs and is against our common European values’, he said.

He noted that since her term of office would expire this year, impeachment would only shorten Zourabichvili’s term by a maximum of one month and would therefore be a ‘symbolic’ move.

‘We cannot leave the deliberate, gross and systematic violation of the main law of the Georgian people unpunished’, he added. ‘The violator of the constitution, Salome Zourabichvili, should remain not the former president, but the deposed president’.

Speaking to Formula on Monday, constitutional scholars called Zourabichvili’s impeachment process by Georgian Dream an act of ‘political revenge’.

That same day, opposition politicians told Formula that Georgian Dream had begun the impeachment process to divert public attention from the parliamentary elections.