Zourabichvili says her potential arrest won’t affect protest movement
In an interview with The Rest Is Politics, a current affairs podcast, Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili again stressed that she will remain president and continue carrying out her role, saying that she will divulge more details on Sunday, the day President-elect Mikheil Kavelashvili is inaugurated.
Interview with @RestIsPolitics
— Salome Zourabichvili (@Zourabichvili_S) December 27, 2024
https://t.co/9YIEFzrNPP
During the interview, Zourabichvili spoke of Georgian Dream’s time as a ruling party, stressing that many ‘original’ members of the party had left as a result of the party’s ‘autocratic turn and then very radically by this Russian turn’, moves which she said were made ‘completely under the control of one person, which is Mr [Bidzina] Ivanishvili.’
‘Nobody else decides anything today’, she said.
Zourabichvili also praised Armenia’s turn to Europe as a ‘very brave decision’, but said that such a move ‘cannot happen’ without Georgia.
Asked what might happen should she get arrested on Sunday — a reference to threats made by Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze — Zourabichvili said her arrest would ‘consolidate’ the protest movement.
‘Even if that happens, it’s not finished, because the Georgian population is on the street, it’s a society that is much more democratic than its political elite’, she said.
‘This generation that was born after the independence of Georgia is a very different generation, and one that is very free, that has been traveling, studying outside the borders of Georgia, and those people are not going to accept that they are stolen from their European future’, she added.
‘So whatever happens to me in a way is only going to consolidate these people on the streets, […] that won’t change because Georgia’s been used over centuries and centuries to [being a] sometimes bigger but still small country and to be fighting its own fights.’