WILL A WEAKER SAAKASHVILI GIVES RISE TO A STRONGER

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 TBILISI 000069 SIPDIS SIPDIS DEPT FOR EUR DAS BRYZA & EUR/CARC E.O. 12958: DECL: 01/14/2018 TAGS: PGOV PREL KDEM GG SUBJECT: WILL A WEAKER SAAKASHVILI GIVES RISE TO A STRONGER DEMOCRACY IN GEORGIA? Classified By: Ambassador John F. Tefft for reasons 1.4(b&d). Summary -------------- ¶1. (C) By narrowly crossing the fifty-percent threshold to gain a first-round victory January 5, Mikheil Saakashvili won another five-year term as Georgia's president. Nevertheless, the close result suggests that Georgian politics will be decidedly different in this term than in the first, when the perception of Saakashvili's overwhelming popular support dwarfed all rivals. Saakashvili maintained his strong mandate for nearly four years while leading the Rose Revolution, and many Georgians (including Saakashvili himself) had perhaps begun to think he might be immune to the pendulum swings of public opinion that eventually brought down the first post-communist governments that came to power during the democratic movements across eastern Europe. That perception of invincibility has now been shattered. Saakashvili had huge advantages over his opponents in campaign cash, organization, and even in personal qualities: the second-place finisher was an inarticulate businessman nominated by opposition parties who did not want a strong leader, and the third-place finisher was an expatriate oligarch whom the government exposed plotting a coup during the campaign. Clearly, the votes for them were largely protest votes against Saakashvili. Saakashvili is now moving to repair his image, starting with putting a more moderate, compassionate face on his cabinet. The logic of much of his first-term agenda -- to consolidate painful but permanent reforms to westernize Georgian society -- will now likely give way to a greater sense of give-and-take with the opposition and public. This will at times likely be frustrating to those of us familiar with the fast pace of reform in the last four years, but if things go well it could leave as a legacy something Georgia currently lacks: a competitive multi-party system. This ultimately would strengthen Georgian democracy. End Summary. Winning Small -------------- ¶2. (C) According to official results, Saakashvili received 53.47% of the vote, followed by Levan Gachechiladze with 25.69%, Badri Patarkatsishvili with 7.1%, Shalva Natelashvili with 6.49%, David Gamkrelidze with 4.02%, and two other candidates with less than 1% each. After landslide wins in the 2004 presidential and parliamentary elections, as well as in the 2006 local elections, these results show a Saakashvili whose popularity has come down to earth. This is all the more notable because Saakashvili's campaign was immensely better funded and organized than any of the others. Saakashvili's face was plastered on billboards and buses all over the country, while advertising for other candidates was rare. In Tbilisi, for example, one could not find a major thoroughfare which did not have Saakashvili's image on it at regular intervals: Saakashvili hugging pensioners, Saakashvili playing with children, or Saakashvili greeting troops. Some argue that this campaigning was a miscalculation -- that frustration with Saakashvili among the public was so high that pictures of him everywhere hurt rather than helped him. Saakashvili soundly lost the capital, which includes one-third of the Georgian population. ¶3. (C) The close vote overall was definitely not the result of effective opposition campaigning. Several opposition leaders in the nine-party United National Council (UNC) told us they had chosen Gachechiladze as their candidate because he would be the most "credible" spokesman for the opposition's pledge to abolish the position of elected president. He also was the one person all could agree upon. True to this form, Gachechiladze did not come across as particularly presidential in his television appearances and rallies during the campaign, and his muddled speaking style and often crude speech was in stark contrast to that of the fast-talking, multi-lingual Saakashvili. Patarkatsishvili spent a considerable amount of money on his campaign (at least if one can judge by the handsome offices and furnishings and large staffs who populated his campaign offices nationwide) but he spent the entire campaign in England. His most attention-grabbing comments were recorded unbeknownst to him in December by a Georgian police commander whom he attempted to recruit into a plot to overthrow the government after the election. A Referendum on the Incumbent -------------- ¶4. (C) Simply put, the votes in this election were either for or against Saakashvili, and the two categories were divided almost equally. Why the sharp drop in support for a leader who seemed largely untouchable as recently as September? The first reason is the sense of many ordinary Georgians that TBILISI 00000069 002 OF 003 their standard of living has not improved since Saakashvili came to power. While Georgia's economy has experienced remarkable growth in this period, this has not been accompanied by a large number of new jobs. The government has struggled to contain inflation, now running at 11 percent or more, making even staple products painfully expensive (and monthly becoming more so) for middle to low-income families. In the meantime, Saakashvili's reforms have disadvantaged many: police officers, educators, and others who have lost their jobs in re-organizations intended to fight corruption, beneficiaries of organized crime networks broken up by the government, and government employees whose places of work were privatized. For these people, the fountains and bright lights in Tbilisi represented not progress, but a privileged few thriving while their own lives worsened. ¶5. (C) Interestingly, however, Saakashvili's support was lowest in the two cities that have benefited most from recent economic growth, Tbilisi and Batumi. Both these cities have a large number of educated, politically aware people -- sometimes called the intelligentsia, although the number of people who fit into this category is much larger than the name implies -- and this group, especially those over about age 35, soured on Saakashvili some time ago. There are at least two cultural explanations for this. First, this group has a certain classist attitude which disdains the many outsiders (i.e. those not for generations born and bred in Tbilisi) moving into key government and advisory positions. This includes Saakashvili's tendency to place people "from the village" into key Government posts. Despite their terrible plight, many of the internally displaced persons from the internal conflicts in South Ossetia and Abkhazia are viewed as outsiders here. Similarly, there is a sense that Saakashvili's appeal to the ethnic minorities - specifically the ethnic Armenians and Azeris in the south -- is somehow un-Georgian. He is in fact the first president (and the only candidate) to do so. Second, this group more than any other saw both its influence and status fall with reforms that downsized Government, cut benefits, and made selection processes for schools and other positions more open and transparent. At the same time, they saw Saakashvili and his young team as arrogant and unwilling to listen to advice, something Shevardnadze and most Soviet-era leaders had made a special point to do. ¶6. (C) Each of these segments of society had its own reasons to be dissatisfied with the government, not all of which were mutually shared. Throughout the crisis in the fall and then the campaign, the Tbilisi-centered opposition parties repeatedly chose to stress proposals like changing the date of elections and reducing the power of the presidency over economic themes that might have had greater appeal to the poor. But even before the election was called, one issue had come to symbolize the government's flaws in a way that resonated with both groups: property rights. There were a large number of highly public controversies in 2007 as the government moved to seize and sell property for development. This property was not only that of a large mass of Tbilisi residents, but also it hit squarely on the residents with long ties to their property and the city who lived in old, dilapidated but highly prized sections of the city. While the government offered legal justifications that often seemed to us to be credible (in many cases the evicted people and businesses did not have valid deeds or even leases) these explanations were largely lost on a society with little experience with property law. ¶7. (C) Then came the events of the fall, starting with former Defense Minister Okruashvili's attempt to shield himself from arrest on corruption charges by directing his own sensational charges against Saakashvili. The large crowds that turned out to protest Okruashvili's arrest in October were the first visible sign of a large vein of dissatisfaction into which the opposition could tap. The violence on November 7, accompanied by the five-week shutdown of Patarkatsishvili's Imedi TV, shocked many Georgians who had previously supported Saakashvili, and created a rupture in his support that he was not able to heal in the campaign. In the past Saakashvili had been seen as the defender of Georgia against foreign and domestic enemies, but public cynicism about him had grown so much by this point that many were doubting that Saakashvili would obtain even 50 percent in the first round of the elections until the audiotape evidence of Patarkatsishvili plotting a violent coup turned around the dynamic in Saakashvili's favor. What Next? -------------- ¶8. (C) Saakashvili has a tough task ahead in trying to stop the downward slide in his popularity, and the opposition will TBILISI 00000069 003 OF 003 not make it easy in what may be a drawn-out standoff over the legitimacy of the election. This will be followed by a spring parliamentary election that is likely to produce a much more representative, but also more contentious and divided parliament. Both during the presidential campaign and after, Saakashvili has shown signs that he realizes he needs a new approach to re-connect with the public and the opposition. His most dramatic public move thus far was replacing the dour Prime Minister Noghaideli with banker Lado Gurgenidze -- a national celebrity for his role as host of the Georgian version of Donald Trump's program "The Apprentice" -- in December. Saakashvili is hinting widely at further personnel changes when he announces his second-term cabinet, possibly even including members of the opposition if they will agree. Since immediately after the election, he has been negotiating quietly and determinedly with the opposition on addressing a list of grievances which would prompt the opposition to accept Saakashvili's election win and focus on the Parliamentary election. These include such items as giving greater representation to the opposition on key boards (state television, the courts, the election commission, law enforcement oversight, the government's auditing firm, and a body to consider changes in the constitution). Part of this negotiation also includes the election date (May 4 or 11) and amnesty for prisoners convicted for violence during the demonstrators' conflicts with police last November 7. ¶9. (C) On policy, Saakashvili and Gurgenidze rolled out a series of new programs during the campaign to aid the socially disadvantaged population, and the price for these programs is already being paid by other parts of the budget. An increase in the defense budget, just approved by Parliament in September, has been slashed, with one recent consequence being the government's decision to postpone the commercial purchase of U.S. made helicopters. Saakashvili has publicly pledged that he will spend more of his second term in Georgia, not on foreign trips. The overall result is likely to be a government that is less ambitious (and possibly less able) in pursuing politically painful reforms. Comment -------------- ¶10. (C) Georgia has made huge strides in the past four years, going from the brink of being a failed state to being the "top performer" in World Bank assessments of ease of doing business, a major U.S. security partner with its increasingly professionalized military making a large contribution in Iraq, and a developing democracy that just had the most competitive election in its history. We believe these steps forward are not likely to be reversed, but the pace of future reforms will likely be slower as the government moves from a revolutionary one to one which includes more of the voices of the Georgian population. Saakashvili's mistakes during the crisis in the fall brought him to this stage more quickly than expected, but the change was inevitable sooner or later. No government in a democracy can remain popular indefinitely while pushing through major changes that, in the short term at least, negatively impact large segments of society. Provided the reform pace does not stop altogether, the new political reality is not necessarily all bad: the opposition now has the opportunity to transform into a constructive, responsible force, and thereby to provide Georgia with the most important element of democratic consolidation that it is missing: a competitive, multi-party system. If so, the ultimate legacy of Georgia's winter of discontent could be a more mature, stable democracy. TEFFT