Georgia on a wild ride to democracy

TBILISI, Georgia — A year after the peaceful Rose Revolution transformed this small South Caucasus country, the symbolism of President Mikhail Saakashvili’s bandaged right hand is almost too perfect.

Sheepish and amused at the same time, the president — at 36, he is Europe’s youngest national leader — explained that he hurt his hand when he crashed his bicycle while talking on a cell phone.

“I broke the hand,” he said with a huge laugh, “but I saved the phone.”

It’s a safe bet that no one ever photographed former President Eduard Shevardnadze, former foreign minister of the Soviet Union, riding a bicycle.

For many Georgians, the 12 months since popular disgust with rigged parliamentary elections forced Mr. Shevardnadze from power have been a little bit like that bike ride — exhilarating and exhausting, combining a real sense of moving ahead with a nagging fear that the rambunctious new president might be headed for a tumble.

The bloom is not off the Rose Revolution, but Mr. Saakashvili said he agrees with increasingly vocal critics that his government must transform last year’s euphoria into the tedious and often unpopular business of overhauling the country’s stagnant economy.

“The worst day of the past year for us was the day after the presidential election,” said Mr. Saakashvili, who won the hastily organized presidential election on Jan. 4 with 96 percent of the vote.

“That was a disaster — the best margin to win by is 51 percent, because then you don’t disappoint so many people. Managing expectations has been a constant challenge for us, but I think so far we have been able to stay on the positive side.”

The president remains very popular, but an increasingly vocal chorus of critics, many of whom sang the praises of the Rose Revolution a year ago, has taken him to task for falling short on policy and for what they see as a tendency to amass power and short-circuit legal niceties to accomplish his ends.

An open letter signed Oct. 18 by 14 prominent civil activist groups slammed what commentator Jaba Devdariani called the president’s “smash-mouth governing style,” citing selective prosecution of political opponents, continuing reports of police abuse, manipulation of the press and the president’s “intolerance toward people with different opinions.”

In one high-profile case, Sulkhan Molashvili, a chief auditor in the Shevardnadze government, has been held in pretrial detention since April, prompting expressions of concern from human rights groups and the Council of Europe.

Prosecutors say Mr. Molashvili profited from corruption under the old regime, but critics say his treatment is part of an old feud with Mr. Saakashvili, who served as justice minister under Mr. Shevardnadze for a time.

“Attempts to establish an intellectual dictatorship and mono-opinion will not lead the country to rapid reforms, but to authoritarian rule and stagnation,” the open letter said.

Sergei Arutiunov, head of the Department of Caucasus Studies at Moscow’s Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, said Georgia’s new leader inspires both admiration and wariness across the region.

“On the one hand, he’s a clever, educated, progressive guy who’s made Georgia an interesting country again,” he said. “On the other hand, he’s very young, politically inexperienced and has a tendency to make foolish statements that he can’t fulfill and nobody can forget.”

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