Georgia to Swear In New President as Opposition Calls Protests

(Bloomberg) -- Georgia’s first woman president took office on Sunday after a rancorous vote that triggered allegations of election fraud from the losing candidate.

French-born Salome Zurabishvili, an ex-Georgian foreign minister, was sworn in as the Caucasus republic’s fifth president at a ceremony at a former royal residence in the eastern city of Telavi, about 95 kilometers (59 miles) from the capital, Tbilisi. Her defeated opponent, Grigol Vashadze, and thousands of protesters were denied entry to the city where the ceremony was held.

“They have stolen our vote, they have stolen our will and now they blocked our ways to Telavi,” Vashadze told reporters. “Nothing is left to our constitutional rights.”

Georgia’s central election commission approved final results of the Nov. 28 vote on Friday, showing that Zurabishvili beat Vashadze by 59.5 percent to 40.5 percent in the country’s first-ever runoff for the presidency. She was backed by the ruling Georgian Dream party of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the country’s richest man, while Vashadze represented an opposition coalition led by the United National Movement of former President Mikheil Saakashvili.

The elections were well run, though “one side enjoyed an undue advantage,” international observers led by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reported Nov. 29. Initiatives such as the announcement of debt relief for 600,000 people by a financial institution linked to Ivanishvili, and the involvement of senior government officials in the campaign “continued to blur the line between the state and party,” according to the report.

Zurabishvili, 66, who’s the first woman elected as president in any former Soviet republic outside the Baltic states, will serve a six-year term.

“Every president of Georgia has laid an important brick in the development of Georgia," Zurabishvili said in her speech. “I promise to be everyone’s president and serve the term under the constitution as the president to unite people."

Telavi was chosen for the inauguration because most of its residents didn’t vote for her and “I want to show that I will be the president of each Georgian citizen,” she told reporters Dec. 5.

The bitterly fought contest was the last direct election for the largely ceremonial post, under constitutional changes approved last year that completed Georgia’s shift to a parliamentary system of government. In 2024, the president will be chosen by a 300-member electoral college made up of members of parliament and local government representatives.

To contact the reporter on this story: Helena Bedwell in Tbilisi at hbedwell@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Torrey Clark at tclark8@bloomberg.net, Steve Geimann, Amy Teibel

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