PM Garibashvili: ‘Gakharia is a sly traitor’

Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili says that the country’s former PM also under the Georgian Dream (GD) leadership, a founder of the opposition For Georgia political party, ‘is a sly traitor, who betrayed the GD’.  

While in Samegrelo region earlier today Garibashvili said that Gakharia is ‘deliberately spreading fake information as if his party is a project of the GD founder Bidzina Ivanishvili and that the GD has plans to make a coalition with For Georgia’.  
Garibashvili said that ‘this will never happen with the traitor.’  

In June 2021 Ivanishvili, who left Georgian politics for the  second time in January 2021, also said that Gakharia ‘betrayed the ruling party and the Georgian state’ when he resigned in February 2021 with the reason that he was against the arrest of opposition leader Nika Melia. 
 Gakharia said then that Melia ‘really committed a crime’. However, his arrest amid the political crisis  in the country which was sparked after the 2020 parliamentary elections would have further complicated the situation.  

Gakharia said that he resigned because his view was not shared by the GD leadership.  Ivanishvili said that the reason cited by Gakharia for his resignation ‘was against the rule of law.’  

Later GD officials expressed a suspicion that the UNM and Gakharia had plans to overthrow the Georgian Dream government.  

The For Georgia party member Kakhaber Kemoklidze has posted on Facebook after Garibashvili’s today’s statement that unlike the Georgian Dream, ‘which has many times caused tension in the country and betrayed the EU-mediated agreement signed in April 2021, Gakharia has never escaped his responsibilities.