SEVEN months after the general election in Georgia, its protagonists are still campaigning against each other. President Mikheil Saakashvili, whose party lost the election to the Georgian Dream coalition led by Bidzina Ivanishvili, a business tycoon who is now prime minister, rallied his supporters in Tbilisi last month. Mr Ivanishvili seems more preoccupied with attacking the outgoing president than with reviving Georgia’s stuttering economy. Emotions are running high and accusations abound.
Yet unusually enough, life for most Georgians has so far carried on as normal. The traffic police still do not take bribes and the streets are still lit. Indeed, the difficulty of cohabitation between winner and loser is a side-effect of a broadly positive development in Georgia, where political power had never before been transferred peacefully and losers often vanished overnight. Mr Saakashvili has chosen to remain as president until his term expires in October, when Georgia will become a parliamentary republic.A recent poll showed that, although support for Mr Saakashvili’s United National Movement party is down to only 10%, most Georgians believe in the virtues of a strong…
