Georgian Government ready to further discuss the constitution
By Gvantsa Gabekhadze
Monday, July 10
Georgia’s Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili stresses that the Georgian Dream ruling team is ready to continue discussions with the oppositionover the constitutional amendments.
“We are ready to adopt the constitution that will express the will of the biggest part of our people,” Kvirikashvili stated.
Kvirikashvili said that the Venice Commission and its chairperson "were happy” with the Georgian Government’s intention to provide high consensus over the country’s main law.
Kvirikashvili highlighted that the ruling team, unlike the previous United National Movement leadership, has provided all efforts to ensure large-scale public involvement in discussing the constitutional changes.
Georgia’s President, who dislikes several key changes in the draft of the constitutional amendments, has offered the ruling team to start the discussions from July 10, as not to spare time only on empty suggestions.
Meanwhile, part of the non-parliamentary opposition say that the ruling team may offer reduction ofthe number of majoritarian MPs for the next parliamentary elections. The proposal shall be also supported by the opposition party European Georgia. They stress such a solution would be unacceptable as the ruling team’s one of the key promises written in the initial version of the draft was related to the full rejection of the majoritarian elections.
Now the Georgian Dream says that the full abolishment of majoritarian elections will be postponed until 2024 parliamentary elections, which is condemned by representatives of the opposition and some NGOs.
Opposition says the majoritarian elections benefit the ruling team.
The current constitution was amended under the United National Movement authorities in 2010 and was a guarantor of UNM’s political ruling for years.
The Georgian Dream, NGOs and experts have stated many times that the changes adopted by the previous leadership caused "a range of problems and imbalance between different state institutions”.
The aim of the ongoing constitutional reform is to fill gaps and produce the "best, European level constitution,” as the Georgian Dream says.
The Venice Commission of the Council of Europe said they approved a "big part of the planned changes” and recommended the government to continue discussions on the topics that are most disputed, among them, the delay in full transfer to proportional elections..
Several days ago head of the Venice Commission stated in Tbilisi he was “much disappointed over the alleged delay and the lack of consensus between key players over the constitutional changes".
The most disputed issues are related to introducing fully proportional elections, the direct or indirect election of the president, sharing of undistributed votes [those votes received by the parties which failed to appear in Parliament] between the parliamentary parties and others.
