KYIV – The political standoff between erstwhile allies President Petro Poroshenko and ex-Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili came to a denouement on February 12 – at least on Ukrainian soil – when the latter was forcibly deported to Poland.
The former Odesa Oblast governor whom the president had appointed as part of a team of foreign reformers in the wake of the Euro-Maidan revolution was seen being dragged by the hair from a Kyiv restaurant. The Border Guard Service confirmed the same day that the 50-year-old former college chum of Mr. Poroshenko had been flown back to Poland from where he re-entered Ukraine in September after the president stripped him of citizenship.
The scene encapsulated an atmosphere devoid of rule-of-law and the nation’s mood – 70 percent of the public, according to multiple polls, are disillusioned with all current political forces in office. Mr. Poroshenko and his allies are seen as moving too slowly on reforms, whereas those in opposition are seen as too radical to replace them.
In one stroke, the president eliminated the newly minted opposition politician from next year’s presidential and parliamentary elections, yet magnified his own lackluster pace on reforms, said Yuriy Yakymenko, director of political and legal programs at the Razumkov Center analytical center in Kyiv.
By removing a “charismatic, yet radical” politician from the scene, the president “raised the significance of those who remain, like [former Prime Minister] Yulia Tymoshenko,” the political analyst told The Ukrainian Weekly over the phone.
Still, Mr. Poroshenko’s much-publicized spat with his former ally is partially of his own doing, Mr. Yakymenko added.
Mr. Saakashvili was appointed to oversee perhaps the nation’s most corrupt region, Odesa, in May 2015 during a time when other foreigners were invited to take on key government positions. For example, Chicago-born Natalie Jaresko was busy restructuring Ukraine’s eurobonds with foreign creditors as finance minister. Lithuanian-native Aivaras Abromavicius as economy minister was in the throes of implementing the game-changing ProZorro public procurement system that ended up saving tax payers millions of hryvni.
But the billionaire president “didn’t tell him [Saakashvili] what he should do here… so the only option he saw was to deport him,” said the Razumkov Center analyst.
As Odesa governor, the former Georgian president hit the ground running. He had a bulldozer ram through a wall on beachfront property that is owned by multi-millionaire Vasyl Khmelnytsky, citing legislation on free public access to beaches. After that, Mr. Saakashvili got “zero tangible results,” before resigning in November 2016, said Brian Mefford, an American business and political consultant with 19 years’ experience in Ukraine.
“After the Euro-Maidan there was an ‘all hands on deck mentality’,” said the American expert. “As a reformist in Georgia, Saakashvili was one of the foreigners asked to use their expertise, he got an open invitation to make Ukraine better, not create a problem.”
Blaming entrenched corruption in Odesa and weak political support from Kyiv, Mr. Saakashvili resigned.
He subsequently went into opposition, announced the establishment of his political party, the Movement of New Forces, and started comparing “Poroshenko with [Russian president Vladimir] Putin,” said Mr. Mefford. “Misha [Saakashvili] provoked his deportation… you can’t coax him with a lollipop… he’s never a person of moderation, he is a person who has lived with huge drama in his life… he wakes up every day looking for a fight.”
Mr. Saakashvili started holding weekend anti-government rallies that the prosecutor’s office said were paid for by people closely tied to ex-President Viktor Yanukovych based in Moscow. He denied the accusations. He called on Mr. Poroshenko to move faster with reforms, namely to create an anti-corruption court and strip lawmakers of immunity from prosecution. Meanwhile, Ukrainian courts denied Mr. Saakashvili’s application for asylum, eventually leading up to formal grounds for his deportation.
While visiting Washington, Mr. Saakashvili discovered that he was stripped of Ukrainian citizenship in 2017, rendering him stateless because he had lost his Georgian passport upon taking on the Odesa governorship two years earlier.
Indeed, Mr. Saakashvili is largely credited for turning his country around in 2008, after a people’s movement known as the Rose Revolution. He turned towards the West and away from Moscow by embracing free-market, transparent governance and anti-graft policies.
But towards the end of his presidency in 2013, Mr. Saakashvili had started to persecute his political rivals and stripped the citizenship of his main challenger, as Mr. Poroshenko later did to him.
“Either Saakashvili needed to search for political partners in Odesa Oblast, which he couldn’t do. Or he didn’t want to,” said Oleksiy Haran, research director of the Democratic Initiatives think tank. “Instead, he started to proclaim political slogans that from the outset went beyond the purview of his competency as governor. In the end, this led to conflict, in particular with the president.”
No political party or its leader enjoys popular approval at the moment. Seventy percent of the public voices disillusionment with the available crop of political players, with as many saying the country needs new leaders, while 20 percent only say they already exist. It’s a sign the electorate is looking for fresh faces, is no longer easily swayed by charismatic personalities and demands more political substance.
“It’s a trend that’s not there yet, but we see a problem with new political leaders who too quickly become the face of old leaders,” said Mr. Yakymenko of the Razumkov Center. “There’s certainly a case of supply not meeting demand, but in the 2014 parliamentary and presidential elections we saw new faces [quickly] transform into the old ones.”
In a note to investors, Dragon Capital wrote that “implications for the domestic political scene look limited at this stage, with Ukrainians’ equally low level of trust in both the ruling parties and the opposition… as playing into the authorities’ hand in this particular case.”
Asked whether Mr. Saakashvili will enjoy more media exposure in Poland, where he doesn’t face a blackout as he did in Ukraine’s oligarch-controlled media landscape, Mr. Mefford said: “This was a calculated decision by Poroshenko, he’s willing to take criticism from abroad.”
Indeed, Western leaders and pundits were mostly silent upon the news of the former Georgian leader’s deportation. Only Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and one of the most vociferous allies of Ukraine, tweeted on February 12: “Depriving Saakashvili of his only citizenship was a clear violation of his human rights. Forcible [sic] deporting him makes things even worse.”
He later added another tweet: “You can agree or disagree with Mikheil Saakashvili, and opinions are divided, but in any law-abiding democracy even opponents have rights.”