Page 49 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine September 2024

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following that we will see accession negotiations being offered again to Georgia”, she says.
The new UNM chair predicts that a new pro-Western democratic government, should they be elected, will be so focused on the EU reform agenda that “an offer of good faith will be provided from the EU” once Brussels sees that Georgia is committed to joining.
“Our guarantor for security, stability and prosperity can only be membership to the EU and eventually also Nato. The Georgian people understand that”, she says.
41-year-old Bokuchava was elected as UNM chair in June, adding to her existing responsibilities as head of the UNM parliamentary faction, Strength is in Unity, the largest in the Georgian parliament. Since her appointment as chair her focus has shifted to the wider party and preparation for the elections, she says.
UNM’s current electoral strategy, Bokuchava explains, involves
primarily solidifying the party’s large pre-existing base of loyal voters, and secondly, appealing to the wider pool of opposition-minded voters and trying to win support there. Whilst it’s important to her to maximise specifically UNM votes, Bokuchava insists that her party remains guided by the “overarching national objective” of securing a European future for Georgia.
No time to lose
Last month UNM and the likeminded Strategy Aghmashenebeli party (along with several non-political representatives from civil society and academia) united to form a new pre-electoral political platform named “Unity for the Salvation of Georgia”. Both parties will run in the autumn under this platform which bares UNM’s trademark electoral number 5.
“We are the first to announce our unification,” Bokuchava says. “GD is already down in the trenches preparing for E-day and we felt we didn’t have any time to lose.”
UNM and SA have a history of collabo- ration and, according to Bokuchava,
“have good experience working together”. She highlighted the 2018 Georgian presidential elections, where the unified UNM/SA candidate, Grigol Vashadze, won 37% in the initial round
of elections, preventing the Georgian Dream endorsed independent candidate Salome Zourabichvili (who won 38%) from achieving a 50% majority. (Although Zourabichvili did go on to win the presidency in the second round.)
The new platform was met with criticism from Georgian Dream, who claimed Bokuchava had “brought together the old faces of UNM under a new name, attempting to mislead the
Georgia to the EU. Of course there are difficulties attached to this, it’s not a completely utopian picture, although I think it is very important for Georgia to establish a political tradition of forming coalitions, of building bridges and of compromising in the national and public interests,” she says.
Crucially, Bokuchava and Vashadze were brought together by their shared belief that the entire Georgian pro-Western opposition should unite on a single electoral list for the upcoming elections. That hasn’t happened so far, largely because the other opposition parties
are still suspicious of the UNM over
“Our guarantor for security, stability and prosperity can only be membership to the EU and eventually also Nato. The Georgian people understand that”
public ahead of the October elections” (SA leader Giorgi Vashadze, among other platform additions, is a former UNM member).
When asked how she responds to these accusations of recycling old UNM cadres, Bokuchava told bne IntelliNews that GD has “unleashed” propaganda against UNM, as the main opposition player, for years.
“This is not new to us. No matter what we do, we always become targeted. If we had brought people that had never had any connection to politics then I’m sure that would have been grounds for attack and criticism. I am actually quite unconcerned about what the government [Georgian Dream] has to say at this point,” she says.
Bokuchava is hopeful the new platform improves UNM’s chances of taking power back from Georgian Dream in the autumn, as opposed to if they were to run individually.
“I believe absolutely that the next government will be a coalition government, and that it will be a coalition government who take
what they regard as its authoritarian turn under its founder and jailed ex-president Mikheil Saakashvili before the party lost power in 2012.
“Our vision was complete unification”, Bokuchava says, the idea being that “theoretical negatives which may have been attached to each party when running individually are tempered
and mitigated” by the “positive effect created by the unity”. In other words, the pros of a united opposition dilute any voter reservations surrounding one particular party or another – the parties all balance each other out.
“This was one of the many, many arguments why I thought there
should have been a unified list but unfortunately there were sceptics from other parties,” says Bokuchava, adding that she and Vashadze “spared no effort” in attempts to achieve their vision of a single opposition union.
The recent reality of political unions has indeed played out differently: Bokuchava and Vashadze’s “Unity for the Salvation” is one of multiple smaller alliances that have formed within the opposition. In early July, parties Akhali,
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