Mikheil "Misha" Saakashvili (born 21 December 1967) is a Georgian-Ukrainian politician. He was the third president of Georgia for two consecutive terms from January 2004 to November 2013, with a break from November 2007 to January 2008 after he stepped down following anti-government demonstrations and ahead of an early presidential election. He is the founder and former chairman of Georgia's United National Movement party. From May 2015 until November 2016, Saakashvili was the governor of Ukraine's Odesa Oblast.
A jurist by occupation, Saakashvili entered Georgian politics in 1995 as a member of Parliament and the Minister of Justice under President Eduard Shevardnadze. He then founded the opposition United National Movement party. In 2003, as a leading opposition figure, he accused the government of rigging the 2003 Georgian parliamentary election, which triggered mass street protests and President Shevardnadze's ouster in the bloodless Rose Revolution. Saakashvili's key role in the protests led to his election as president in 2004.
As president, Saakashvili oversaw far-reaching reforms. His government dismissed and replaced the entire police force, hoping to root out corruption, and pursued a zero-tolerance policy towards crime. Its neoliberal economic policy abolished various taxes, lowered corporate income tax from 20% to 15% and dividend tax from 10% to 5%. Several ministries were abolished and 60,000 civil servants dismissed, slashing government spending, although the military budget rose to 9.2% of GDP by 2007. In 2009, Forbes ranked Georgia's tax burden as the fourth lowest in the world. GDP grew between 2003 and 2013. Per-capita income roughly tripled, but by 2013 about a quarter of the population was still below the poverty line, even as international perceptions emphasised business-friendliness and reduced corruption. Saakashvili was embroiled in scandals and accused of being behind police brutality, such as the beating of opposition politician Valery Gelashvili, the murder of Sandro Girgvliani, and systemic torture and rape in the Georgian prison system.
Saakashvili was reelected in 2008, but his party lost the 2012 Georgian parliamentary election. Term limits meant he could not stand again, and an opposition candidate, nominated by Bidzina Ivanishvili and the Georgian Dream coalition, Giorgi Margvelashvili, won the 2013 presidential election. In late 2013, ex-President Saakashvili left Georgia. In 2014, the Prosecutor's Office of Georgia filed criminal charges against him. In May 2015, Saakashvili became the governor of Ukraine's Odesa Oblast in a tenure that lasted 18 months. In 2018, the Tbilisi City Court sentenced him in absentia to six years in prison for, among other things, ordering Valery Gelashvili's beating. Saakashvili continued to manage his party from abroad. In July 2017, Saakashvili was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship by President Poroshenko, and became stateless until 2019. He reentered Ukraine, but was arrested in February 2018 and deported. He was granted permanent residency in the Netherlands, his wife's country. In May 2019, he returned to Ukraine after newly elected President Volodymyr Zelenskyy restored his citizenship. Zelenskyy appointed Saakashvili to lead Ukraine's National Reform Council in May 2020.
In October 2021, Saakashvili announced his return to Georgia after an eight-year absence. Later the same day Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili announced that he had been arrested in Tbilisi. In 2021, he began serving the six-year in absentia prison sentence imposed in 2018. Since May 2022, he has been treated in a civilian clinic in Tbilisi.
Saakashvili was born in Tbilisi on 21 December 1967, capital of the then Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic in the Soviet Union. His father, Nikoloz Saakashvili, is a physician who practises medicine in Tbilisi and directs a local balneological centre. His mother, Giuli Alasania, was a historian.
During university, he served his shortened military service in 1989–1990 with the Soviet Border Troops' checkpoint unit in the Boryspil Airport in Ukraine (then as Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, also a part of the Soviet Union). Saakashvili graduated from the Institute of International Relations (Department of International Law) of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 1992. At this university, he was friends with later President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko. While in Ukraine, Saakashvili participated in the October 1990 student protest known as the "Revolution on Granite".
Saakashvili briefly worked as a human rights officer for the interim State Council of Georgia following the overthrow of President Zviad Gamsakhurdia before receiving a fellowship from the United States State Department (via the Edmund S. Muskie Graduate Fellowship Program). He received an LL.M. from Columbia Law School in 1994 and took classes at the School of International and Public Affairs and The George Washington University Law School the following year. In 1993, he also received a diploma from the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France.
Election to Georgian Parliament
Saakashvili interned at the United Nations. After graduation, while on internship in the New York law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler in early 1995, he was approached by Zurab Zhvania, an old friend from Georgia who was working on behalf of President Eduard Shevardnadze to enter politics. He stood in the December 1995 elections along with Zhvania, and both men won seats in parliament, standing for the Union of Citizens of Georgia, Shevardnadze's party.
Saakashvili was chairman of the parliamentary committee which was in charge of creating a new electoral system, an independent judiciary and a non-political police force. Opinion surveys recognised him to be the second most popular person in Georgia, behind Shevardnadze. He was named "man of the year" by a panel of journalists and human rights advocates in 1997. In January 2000, Saakashvili was appointed vice-president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
On 12 October 2000, Saakashvili became Minister of Justice for the government of President Shevardnadze. He initiated major reforms in the Georgian criminal justice and prisons system. This earned praise from international observers and human rights activists. But, in mid-2001, he became involved in a major controversy with the State Security Minister Vakhtang Kutateladze and Tbilisi police chief Ioseb Alavidze, accusing them of profiting from corrupt business deals.
Saakashvili resigned on 5 September 2001, saying that "I consider it immoral for me to remain as a member of Shevardnadze's government." He declared that corruption had penetrated to the very centre of the Georgian government and that Shevardnadze lacked the will to deal with it, warning that "current developments in Georgia will turn the country into a criminal enclave in one or two years."
In the United National Movement
Having resigned from the government and quit the Shevardnadze-run Union of Citizens of Georgia party, Saakashvili founded the United National Movement (UNM) in October 2001, a centre-right political party with a touch of nationalism, to provide a focus for part of the Georgian reformists leaders. In June 2002, he was elected as the Chairman of the Tbilisi Assembly ("Sakrebulo") following an agreement between the United National Movement and the Georgian Labour Party. This gave him a powerful new platform from which to criticize the government.
Georgia held parliamentary elections on 2 November 2003 which were denounced by local and international observers as being grossly rigged. Saakashvilli claimed that he had won the elections (a claim supported by independent exit polls), and urged Georgians to demonstrate against Shevardnadze's government and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience against the authorities. Saakashvili's UNM and Burdjanadze-Democrats united to demand the ouster of Shevardnadze and the rerun of the elections.