Mikheil Saakashvili

Mikheil Saakashvili led the Rose Revolution, remade the Georgian state, and lost a war with Russia in five days. He trained as a lawyer in Kyiv and New York, entered Georgian politics under Eduard Shevardnadze, and resigned as justice minister accusing the government of corruption. In November 2003 he led protesters carrying roses into parliament during a disputed election and Shevardnadze resigned; Saakashvili won the presidency with over ninety per cent. His reforms were drastic and genuinely effective: he dismissed the entire traffic police force of thirty thousand overnight and rebuilt it, and petty bribery, which had been universal, largely vanished. Georgia's ranking on ease of doing business rose faster than any country's on record. The other side was an increasingly personal grip on power, pressure on the courts and the press, and a prison system that produced a torture scandal in 2012. In August 2008, after months of escalation, he sent troops into South Ossetia; Russia had prepared for it, invaded, and the war was over in five days with two Georgian regions permanently lost. He lost the 2012 election, left the country, became a Ukrainian citizen and governor of Odesa, returned to Georgia secretly in 2021 and was imprisoned. He was convicted in absentia of abuse of office while abroad and imprisoned on returning in 2021, and his health deteriorated sharply in custody amid claims of poisoning. His reputation is genuinely double-sided in Georgia: the man who made the state function and the man who bent it to himself, which is not a contradiction his opponents or his supporters find easy to hold together.

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