On March 25, Georgia’s parliament voted in favor of constitutional amendments that significantly reduce the president’s powers to influence domestic and foreign policy (https://www.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=25887). According to the amendments, the president will have no right to dismiss the government without parliament’s consent. Currently, the Georgian Dream... MORE

The gas producers’ consortium at Shah Deniz in Azerbaijan is holding parallel negotiations with the pipeline project companies, Nabucco and Trans-Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), to select one of these routes to Europe. March 31 is the deadline for submission of Nabucco-West’s and TAP’s competing offers to... MORE

Among the roles of Gazprom’s South Stream pipeline project was that of aborting the EU-backed Nabucco, merely by threatening to preempt Nabucco’s markets along the same route downstream. Conversely, Nabucco’s European rival Trans-Adriatic Pipeline project (TAP) can abort Nabucco by preempting the gas supply source... MORE

On March 22 in Copenhagen, the Danish and Turkish prime ministers, Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Recep Tayyp Erdogan, witnessed the signing of agreements between subsidiaries of Danish Moeller-Maersk and Azerbaijan’s State Oil Company (SOCAR) to develop a giant port near Izmir in Turkey. The petrochemicals holding... MORE

Objectively, the Georgian Dream government is a legatee of the Mikheil Saakashvili government’s trademark foreign policy. National interests require the new government to build on the legacy of its predecessor.On March 16, at the German Marshall Fund’s (GMF) annual Brussels Forum, Georgian Defense Minister Irakli... MORE

The Barack Obama administration declared victory for the “democratic process” in Georgia immediately after that country’s October 1, 2012, parliamentary elections. It defined that victory narrowly as an “orderly transfer of power” from the incumbent government to the election-winning opposition. This would in turn guarantee... MORE

The Barack Obama administration publicly called for an “orderly transfer of power” during Georgia’s electoral campaign. President Obama first gave this message, publicly and (still more explicitly) privately, to the visiting Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili as early as January 2012 in Washington. “Orderly transfer of... MORE

The United States had strongly influenced Georgia’s politics during Mikheil Saakashvili’s presidency. This influence is waning since the regime change that has empowered Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili. The October 2012 parliamentary elections have effected this still-incomplete regime change, pending a constitutional transition period until the... MORE

Georgia’s October 2012 parliamentary elections amounted to a plebiscite on the policies of Mikheil Saakashvili’s government. Voters responded by giving his rival Bidzina Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream 85 parliamentary seats, against Saakashvili’s United National Movement (UNM), which gained 65 seats in the 150-seat chamber. The votes... MORE

In October 2012, Georgia held the freest parliamentary elections in the country’s two decades of experience with competitive multi-party politics. Also for the first time, the opposition defeated the government, in a contest on a “level playing field.” This, however, was not simply a competition... MORE