UNM’s Ana Tsitlidze claims Gvaramia boasted: I am Merab Kostava; I will push Misha aside, and Ivanishvili will hand power to me by 2028

“Gvaramia told me, ‘I am Merab Kostava; I know for a fact I will push Misha [Mikheil Saakashvili] into third or fourth place and become the primary opposition force. By 2028 at the latest, if not sooner, Bidzina [Ivanishvili] will hand government over to me.’ At the time, I thought to myself, this man has completely lost his mind,” declared Ana Tsitlidze, a member of the United National Movement (UNM), speaking on Palitranews.

Tsitlidze added that she was prepared to lay bare extensive insider details.

“We asked valid questions and received nothing but hysteria in return. All Gvaramia offers as answers are personal insults. He claimed I was not in his political weight class and refused to debate me, so now I am trying to gain weight to reach his level!

The very man who built his political stature, Mikheil Saakashvili, was the one Gvaramia swore by on his mother’s life right up until he went to prison. Yet the moment he stepped out of jail, he became Saakashvili’s fiercest reviler and chief enemy. Serious questions remain. In this regard, Nika Melia appears far more direct than Gvaramia, because Gvaramia knows he cannot curse Saakashvili openly and turned out clever enough to refrain, but what he has done in practice represents the gravest form of betrayal. Without Misha, who was Gvaramia anyway? Misha created him from scratch. I could share many more details, and I could bury Gvaramia so deep politically that he would never dare show his face again.

And let us talk about [Nika] Gilauri. Gvaramia tried to force him on us as prime minister throughout the entire election campaign. He went around telling everyone that Gilauri had been agreed upon with Bidzina, that Bidzina would hand power to him without issue, and that he was the ‘golden key’. He met everyone behind closed doors, claiming Gilauri was the candidate most acceptable to Bidzina Ivanishvili, and that everyone had to fall in line with his nomination. Those were Gvaramia’s exact words.

Gvaramia patronisingly lectures us that some of us aren’t in his ‘weight class’. Excuse me, but if I had fleeced Mikheil Saakashvili, I would carry more political weight than Gvaramia too, and I mean that in every sense: morally, financially from the UNM, and across the board. He was drawing a salary of 20,000 dollars at Mtavari TV, while we were often running campaigns without enough money for petrol. At Rustavi 2, his salary was 85,000 GEL. If I had robbed the very person who did the most for me in life, I suppose I might have more ‘weight’ than Gvaramia as well,” Tsitlidze stated.