Dreams to come true

The general public is in a hurry. It wants its dreams to come true as soon as possible not realizing that there are so many shortcomings committed by the previous administration that need to be corrected first. This will require a certain amount of time and is unrealistic to expect the new government to implement all the changes and fulfill all the promises in just a couple of weeks. In reality, the new government has come to power less than a month ago.

It is a reality that during the campaign period, both political forces issued many promises. The Georgian Dream must now fulfill not only its own promises, but also some of the National Movement’s promises as well. The major incentive for the population to vote for the Georgian Dream was its dissatisfaction with the National Movement administration. Popular opinion suggested that this regime committed many unpunished crimes. So now the public is demanding the restoration of justice. But this should be taken together with improving the social conditions of the population.

The process has started. More than a dozen high-ranking officials, mainly from law enforcement bodies, have been detained and presumably more cases will appear. There are many notorious events from the UNM reign. They need to be investigated. For example the obscure death of late PM Zurab Zhvania, the killing of bank employee Sandro Girgvliani by police officers and the violent dispersal of peaceful demonstrators by law enforcement bodies on November 7, 2007 and May 26, 2011 to name only a few.

The expectations are high with regard to social welfare. Items such as the increase of pensions, insuring of population, the decrease of communal tariffs, combating monopolies and others need to be addressed. However one thing should be understood: it is impossible to fulfill all those promises at once. Some of them need to be implemented slowly over time; some of them in fact might require not several days or months, but even years. There are some issues that are constantly changing. For instance, the Georgian Dream promised to make pensions as much as the existing minimum (145 GEL) according to official calculation during the UNM’s governance. In reality, the existing minimum is over GEL 200 and even that figure is changing very quickly. Of course the Georgian budget cannot afford that much of an increase in pensions, this will require several years. There are difficulties in decreasing tariffs on gas and electricity as well as for the price of fuel. Such changes depend on many factors including the overall world situation, transportation costs and so on. The same is related with medicines.

Meanwhile, the National Movement is pressing the Georgian Dream, reminding them to fulfill their campaign promises. So, the situation is quite tense and the National Movement is presumably getting ready for revenge. One possible scenario will be a crisis in the country based on the dissatisfaction of the population because of unfulfilled promises in six months of the Georgian Dream leadership, the discharge of the parliament and calling new elections. However, in this case, the opinion of the analysts is quite different. Most of them suggest that if the elections are held, the former majority UNM will receive not 40% of the votes, but at least twice as less.