Georgia's ruling party starts impeachment of pro-Western president before election

By Felix Light

TBILISI (Reuters) - The speaker of Georgia's parliament said on Monday ruling party lawmakers would move to impeach the pro-Western president ahead of a parliamentary election on Oct. 26, a year after a previous impeachment effort failed.

In a press briefing, Shalva Papuashvili said the charges against President Salome Zourabichvili concerned visits overseas that he said had not been authorised by the government, the same accusations levelled in the previous impeachment last year.

The ruling Georgian Dream party and its allies currently lack sufficient votes in parliament to impeach Zourabichvili, and Papuashvili said he hoped the measure would be passed after the election by a new parliament.

Though elected in 2018 with the support of Georgian Dream, Zourabichvili, whose powers are mostly ceremonial, has since become a foe of the bloc and its powerful founder, billionaire ex-prime minister Bidzina Ivanishvili.

She has in recent weeks been attempting to broker pacts among Georgia's divided and fractious opposition parties, aimed at ousting Georgian Dream at the polls.

A Paris-born former French diplomat of Georgian ancestry, Zourabichvili last week met the presidents of France, Germany and Poland as well as senior European Union officials during a trip to Europe.

The EU said last week it had suspended all high-level contacts with the Georgian government over its "anti-Western and anti-European narratives".

Though Georgia has been broadly pro-Western since independence from Moscow in 1991, foreign and domestic critics have accused Georgian Dream of seeking to sabotage Tbilisi's long-standing goals of EU and NATO membership and reorient the country towards Russia.

Georgian Dream says that it wants Georgia to join the EU and NATO while also avoiding conflict with Russia.

According to opinion polls, Georgian Dream remains the country's single most popular party, though it has lost ground since 2020, when it won almost 50% of the vote and a narrow parliamentary majority.

(Reporting by Felix Light; editing by Mark Heinrich)

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