“No, Mr President, with all due respect, I must disagree with you. As long as decisions are made by three men (figuratively speaking) while the majority finds out on Facebook, the party will remain in permanent crisis and will never belong to the people,” wrote United National Movement (UNM) member Ani Tsitlidze on social media, responding to former President Mikheil Saakashvili.

Earlier, Mikheil Saakashvili had posted on social media: “The UNM is in a profound crisis. The party has lost 70% of its regional grassroots core, partly due to betrayal, interference from the regime, and also mistakes, including my own… The United National Movement simply cannot fall into a worse state than it is today.”

As Ani Tsitlidze writes, this cascade of flawed choices will plague the party until genuine internal democracy, driven by a bottom-up approach, is established within the United National Movement.

“No, Mr President, with all due respect, I must disagree with you on one deeply critical point. This is not about Nanuka’s arrival or Tina’s ‘departure’. This is a systemic fault line in the UNM. As long as decisions are made by three men (figuratively speaking) while the rest of us read about it on Facebook, the party will stay in endless crisis and never become a proper people’s party.

Drawing from past experience, I refuse to take responsibility for things I had no part in, things I actively opposed, or things where decisions were made without anyone ever bothering to ask us. This cascade of flawed choices will continue until genuine internal democracy, where decisions are made from the bottom up, is established in this party.

The UNM has a window of opportunity to change this now, and I hope it seizes it. What we need to change is not the list of names, but the rules of the game. We need transparency, real engagement from our voters and rank-and-file members in party affairs, and an end to backroom decisions. If we achieve this, we move forward; if not, we will just keep running in the exact same circles,” Ani Tsitlidze wrote.