Ms. Zourabishvili’s mandate expired on Sunday morning after the swearing in of her successor, ex-footballer Mikheïl Kavelashvili, loyal to the ruling party, the Georgian Dream.
After having suggested that she could stay in the presidential palace, this 72-year-old brunette woman finally announced that she was leaving the place, while calling herself “the only legitimate president” of the country, and promising to join the demonstrators who for weeks protest daily in the streets of Tbilisi.
“I will leave the presidential palace to stand by your side, carrying with me the legitimacy, the flag and your trust,” she said in front of a crowd of a few thousand supporters, some of whom said they were disappointed with her decision to leave the seat of the presidency.
Ms. Zourabichvili contests the appointment of Mr. Kavelashvili as head of state by a college of voters controlled by the Georgian Dream. She also calls for new legislative elections, after those deemed rigged in October.
She became Georgia’s first female president in 2018 – a position whose powers had just been reduced – then with the support of Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in the country and founder of the Georgian Dream.
The same party is today reviled by the pro-EU demonstrators who have been protesting tirelessly for weeks in Tbilisi, with the support of Ms. Zourabichvili.
Because when the government began to move away from this Caucasian country’s ambitions to join the EU, Salomé Zourabichvili joined the ranks of the government’s critics.
She vetoed, without success, several laws deemed repressive targeting civil society, the media and LGBT+ people.
After the legislative elections of October 26, won by the Georgian Dream but denounced by the opposition, she took up the cause of the pro-European protest movement, presenting herself as “the only legitimate institution” in the country.
“Do business with us, we represent the Georgian population,” argued in an interview with AFP in early December, who accuses her political adversaries of playing into the hands of Russia, a historic regional power.
Defying the Georgian Dream, Ms. Zourabichvili took part in demonstrations in Tbilisi on several occasions, to the applause of the crowd, who chanted her name.
Abroad, in recent months she has established herself as the preferred interlocutor of Westerners. She was at the reopening ceremony of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral at the beginning of December, saying she spoke on this occasion about the “stolen election” with Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron.
She was born in Paris into a family of Georgian refugees who fled the Bolsheviks. One of his ancestors, Niko Nikoladze, was a prominent liberal writer and member of a movement advocating Georgia’s independence from the Russian Empire.
After studying political science, Salomé Zourabichvili chose a diplomatic career which she followed for nearly 30 years with posts at the United Nations, in Washington and in Chad. She ended this career as French Ambassador to Tbilisi in 2004.
After the Rose Revolution of November 2003 in Georgia, which caused the fall of President Eduard Shevardnadze, she was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs for the country’s new leader, the pro-Western reformer Mikheïl Saakashvili, today a controversial opponent who is in prison.
She quickly made enemies in the ranks of the new power, which she accused of authoritarian drift.
She was dismissed in 2005, despite demonstrations of support. She joined the opposition as an MP and became one of Mr Saakashvili’s fiercest critics.
She left politics in 2010 to work for five years for the United Nations group of experts responsible for monitoring Iran, disillusioned by the situation in her country.
She then publicly supported the Georgian Dream and returned to Parliament in 2016 as an independent. After renouncing her French nationality, she was elected president in 2018.
“I must engage in a political fight which has never attracted me, which I have never practiced, and which is imposed on me”, she wrote in her book “A woman for two countries”, published in France in 2006.
