Senior Georgian Dream party lawmaker Irakli Kobakhidze, former speaker, was designated as the new party chair, Kakha Kaladze, GD’s secretary general announced on January 11.
The news comes as Bidzina Ivanishvili, GD founder, announced earlier today that he quits party chairmanship and politics “for good” and is retreating to the “private way of life.”
Around 400 delegates are expected to gather at the party congress on Saturday, January 16, to confirm MP Kobakhidze as the new chairperson, Kaladze stated.
MP Kobakhidze has been serving as the executive secretary of the party since 2015 and was elected as the parliamentary majority leader in the new Georgian Parliament in December 2020.
The new chairman co-founded the Georgian Dream party in 2012 and achieved the top position as a parliamentary speaker in 2016. He had to step down in June 2019 following the Gavrilov controversy when the Russian Duma MP was spotted sitting in his parliamentary chair during the session of the Inter-parliamentary Assembly on Orthodoxy (IAO).
The former speaker quickly regained his publicity as the GD campaign chief ahead of the October 31, 2020 parliamentary elections and landed as Number 3 on the party’s electoral lineup. He has recently been in the spotlight as one of the key negotiators on behalf of GD to solve the post-election political crisis sparked by the unanimous parliamentary boycott of the opposition parties.
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