She Walked Out of the Palace Saying "I'm Taking the Flag and the Legitimacy With Me" — Two Presidents, One Constitution, and a Country That Can't Agree Who's in Charge
Georgia — Constitution Profile
| 📅 Active Since | August 24, 1995 (entered into force October 17, 1995) |
| 🏛️ Government Type | Parliamentary Republic |
| 🌍 Capital | Tbilisi |
| 📜 Notable Predecessor | 1921 constitution — lasted only 4 days |
| 🌹 Defining Event | The 2003 Rose Revolution |
| ⚠️ Current Crisis | Two rival claimants to the presidency since December 2024 |
On December 29, 2024, the outgoing president of Georgia walked out of her official residence and made an unusual claim to the cameras waiting outside. She wasn't just leaving the building, Salome Zourabichvili told the crowd — she was taking something with her that no successor could inherit. "I'm taking legitimacy with me, I'm taking the flag with me, I'm taking your trust with me." Inside the palace, a new president was being sworn in under the same constitution she'd just declared had been violated. For the first time since Georgia's modern constitutional era began three decades earlier, the country had two people who each believed, with apparent sincerity, that they were the legitimate head of state.
The Constitution That Replaced One Which Lasted Just Four Days
Georgia's relationship with constitutional government has a genuinely tragic opening chapter. In 1918, the Democratic Republic of Georgia declared independence and spent three years carefully drafting a constitution, finally adopting it on February 21, 1921. It was, by most accounts, a remarkably progressive document for its era. It also became almost immediately irrelevant: facing the onset of Soviet military aggression, the new constitution functioned for only four days before Soviet forces overran the country and ended its existence.
When Georgia regained independence in 1991 following the Soviet collapse, the country didn't simply dust off that 1921 document and put it back into force. After years of study, input from a dozen competing drafts, and assistance from the Council of Europe's Venice Commission, the Parliament of Georgia adopted an entirely new constitution on August 24, 1995, passing by a vote of 159 to 8. It entered into force on October 17, 1995, establishing Georgia as a sovereign, unitary state with a clear separation of powers — and, notably, a strong executive presidency.
A Revolution Fought With Flowers Instead of Weapons
By November 2003, Georgia's president, the longtime Soviet-era foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, had been in power for nearly a decade, his government increasingly defined by corruption allegations and rigged elections. When the parliamentary election that month was widely seen as fraudulent, opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili walked into a session of parliament holding a single red rose — a deliberate symbol that what was coming would be peaceful. Tens of thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of Tbilisi over the following weeks, and on November 23, 2003, facing a country united against him and his own security forces standing aside, Shevardnadze resigned.
It became known worldwide as the Rose Revolution, and it produced the first bloodless change of power in the post-Soviet Caucasus, inspiring a wave of similar movements across the former USSR in the years that followed. Saakashvili won the resulting January 2004 presidential election with a staggering 96 percent of the vote. Within weeks, his government had pushed rushed constitutional amendments through parliament strengthening the presidency's power to dismiss parliament — the very same office the revolution had just overthrown someone from holding too tightly.
The President Who Spent a Decade Undoing His Own Power Grab
What makes Saakashvili's constitutional legacy unusual is the reversal that came at the end of it. Having centralized power in the presidency immediately after the Rose Revolution — arguing that Georgia's instability demanded a strong, singular leader — Saakashvili spent his final years in office pushing through the opposite change. On October 15, 2010, parliament adopted sweeping amendments by a vote of 112 to 5, significantly reducing the powers of the presidency and shifting them toward the office of prime minister. The new arrangement was deliberately delayed, only taking full effect on November 17, 2013, the day Giorgi Margvelashvili was inaugurated as Saakashvili's successor.
The Venice Commission, which had been closely involved throughout the drafting process, raised pointed concerns. In its review, the body referenced allegations that the shift toward a stronger premiership was driven by personal political calculation rather than a genuine desire to improve how the government functioned — concerns sharpened by speculation that Saakashvili might simply move into the newly empowered prime minister's chair himself once his presidency ended. He never explicitly denied the possibility.
An Article Written Into the Constitution to Lock In a Direction the Country Might Not Get To Choose Again
One of the more unusual features of Georgia's constitutional architecture is how explicitly it commits the country to a specific foreign policy outcome rather than simply describing how government institutions function. Article 78 of the constitution directly enshrines the goal of joining both the European Union and NATO as a constitutional objective, not merely a policy preference subject to whichever party happens to hold power. The European Union and Georgia signed an association agreement in 2014, and in December 2023 the EU formally granted Georgia official candidate status.
That constitutional commitment turned into the spark of Georgia's most serious modern political crisis. On November 28, 2024, the ruling party's government announced it was suspending EU accession negotiations until 2028. Two hundred employees of the National Bank of Georgia took the unusual step of publicly declaring the move inconsistent with Article 78 of their own country's founding document. The announcement that triggered the standoff wasn't a foreign policy dispute in the abstract — it was, by the assessment of the people meant to safeguard the constitution, the government violating it directly.
A Disputed Election and a Parliament That Convened Itself
The October 26, 2024 parliamentary election became the fault line for everything that followed. International monitors described the vote as fundamentally flawed, citing reports of voter intimidation, pressure on public sector employees, and footage circulating online that appeared to show ballot stuffing. President Zourabichvili refused to recognize the official results outright, calling the outcome a total rigging of the public's votes. With the results still being contested in court, parliament moved to seat itself anyway — what legal experts pointed to as a violation of the chamber's own procedural rules, since those rules barred newly elected members from beginning their terms while the Constitutional Court still had election disputes pending. Vakhtang Khmaladze, one of the original authors of Georgia's 1995 constitution, publicly described the resulting government as illegitimate.
Under reforms passed back in 2017, the Georgian presidency is no longer chosen by direct popular vote at all — it's selected by a 300-member Electoral College made up of parliament and regional representatives. With the opposition boycotting entirely, the December 14, 2024 presidential vote produced something unprecedented in the country's history: a single candidate, Mikheil Kavelashvili, running unopposed, a stark drop from the 65 candidates who had contested the previous presidential election in 2018.
The Man Believed to Be Running the Country Without Holding Any Office At All
Perhaps the strangest thread running through Georgia's current constitutional crisis is that the figure widely described as the country's actual decision-maker doesn't occupy a position the constitution recognizes. Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire and former prime minister, formally exited politics back in 2021. By 2024, political analysts including Stephen F. Jones were describing him as the country's "unaccountable and unchecked ruler" regardless. He returned publicly to lead his Georgian Dream party's campaign months before the disputed October election, and by year's end, the United States government had sanctioned him directly, citing his role steering Georgia's foreign policy in an anti-Western, pro-Russian direction.
Kavelashvili, the man inaugurated as president on December 29, 2024, is widely described as a loyalist of Ivanishvili's. Zourabichvili, departing the palace that same day, made her position about the entire situation unmistakably clear, describing the new president's installation as a "parody" with no connection to any legitimate political process. Both of Georgia's other living former presidents, Giorgi Margvelashvili and Mikheil Saakashvili, publicly backed her position — meaning two former heads of state, alongside the sitting president herself, all agreed that the new president occupying the office wasn't legitimately there.
Constitution at a Glance
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| First Modern Constitution (Lasted 4 Days) | February 21, 1921 |
| Independence Restored | 1991 |
| Current Constitution Adopted | August 24, 1995 (159–8 vote) |
| Constitution Entered Into Force | October 17, 1995 |
| Rose Revolution | November 23, 2003 (Shevardnadze resigns) |
| Power Shifted to Prime Minister (Adopted / Took Effect) | October 15, 2010 / November 17, 2013 |
| Presidency Made Indirect (Electoral College) | 2017 constitutional reform |
| Disputed Parliamentary Election | October 26, 2024 |
| EU Accession Talks Suspended | November 28, 2024 (disputed Art. 78 violation) |
| Rival Presidents Both Claim Legitimacy | December 29, 2024–present |
📥 Read/Download the Constitution of Georgia
Read the complete, official text of the Constitution of Georgia:
👉 Read the Constitution of Georgia — Full Text (Official)
A constitution born to replace one that lasted only four days. A revolution fought with roses instead of rifles. A president who walked out of her own palace declaring she was taking the country's legitimacy with her. What part of Georgia's story surprised you most? Tell us in the comments below.
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