Building a Democracy

Georgian President Learns Governing Is Harder Than Staging a Revolution

BOBOKVATI, Georgia -- Out of the hazy Black Sea emerged the president of Georgia as armed guards watched from a rocky beach. Mikheil Saakashvili slipped on a white terry-cloth robe and strolled to the columned veranda of a villa, where he poured a glass of Georgian red wine. "Aslan's wine," he grinned.

Thirty-six hours earlier, the villa had been off limits, the private retreat of warlord Aslan Abashidze. But now Saakashvili, a Washington-trained lawyer, had taken possession of it and was celebrating his second peaceful revolution in six months, this time the removal of the feudal-style ruler of a renegade region his family had run for centuries.

At age 36, Europe's youngest president now faces the more daunting task of channeling the power of discontent in the streets of this ruined former Soviet republic into a sustainable democracy in a part of the world where that has yet to take root.

Saakashvili's Georgia is becoming a case study in the American export of democracy. A winner of one of the Edmund Muskie fellowships, which are awarded to outstanding citizens of the former Soviet states, Saakashvili studied law at Columbia University and human rights at George Washington University. He is part of a generation of foreigners groomed by the United States in hopes they would go back and refashion their homelands with a Western playbook.

Several days spent with him and his team over the last month, including hours of interviews with Saakashvili in his office, over a sushi dinner with his wife and here in Ajaria, open a window into the making of a president. Brash and impulsive, he loves the theater of it all, jumping onto a bulldozer to knock down road barriers to Ajaria or taking his cabinet for a walk to shake hands in the street.

But he has already alienated a few close friends who feel he has gone too far in accumulating power. "The government that came from a democratic revolution is taking a step back from democracy," said Koba Davitashvili, who quit as head of Saakashvili's party and turned down a cabinet post in protest of constitutional changes that the president pushed through to bolster his authority. "I was so angry at him."

Saakashvili acknowledges that he may be "pushy" at times and perhaps overreached in engineering the constitutional changes so fast. It is, he said, a learning process.

"It's much more complex than just a fight between evil and good," he mused over Abashidze's wine earlier this month. "It's hard to distinguish what is the right thing sometimes. It's all the time striking the right balance. That's what governing is all about."

Yet for all that, Saakashvili has built the former Soviet Union's first generation of leaders outside the historically Western-oriented Baltic republics, a team whose members look like him -- in their thirties, Western-educated, untainted by the old system.

They may have little background in running a country, he said, but "absence of experience is an asset in itself. Because what kind of experience was it? Experience at being corrupt. Experience at being part of the old system that didn't work."

A Dysfunctional Country

"Nothing works," groused Natalie Kancheli. "It takes 45 minutes just to print a piece of paper."

Kancheli was sitting in her new office, just weeks into the job as Saakashvili's chief of staff. When she arrived, she found 10 ancient telephones on her desk and no computer. The phones didn't actually connect her with anyone she wanted to talk to, so she stuck to her cell phone. With no computer network and few copiers, she discovered that important memos had to be walked from office to office.

The street revolt that brought her boss to office now seems easy by comparison. As leader of the opposition in this country of 5 million people in the Caucasus Mountains, Saakashvili mobilized tens of thousands of disgruntled Georgians into the streets last November to protest what they viewed as a stolen parliamentary election. After Saakashvili burst into Parliament with a long-stemmed rose, the tired and aging president, Eduard Shevardnadze, finally called it quits. Saakashvili was elected to succeed him two months later with 96 percent of the vote.

The country he inherited was dysfunctional at best. Electricity is sporadic, pensions and salaries often unpaid, bribery epidemic. So many buildings remain shattered by civil wars of the 1990s that foreign diplomats on road trips pass the time counting LAOs, or Large Abandoned Objects.