Kavelashvili takes office as Georgia's new president amid election legitimacy row
The former footballer was sworn in as the country's sixth president while Salome Zourabichvili rejected the result and anti-government protests spread.
Georgia inaugurated Mikheil Kavelashvili as its new president on Sunday in a ceremony that did little to settle the country's political crisis. The ruling Georgian Dream party has already halted talks on joining the European Union, and the inauguration of a far-right former footballer as president only deepened the divide between the government and its critics.
Kavelashvili was sworn in at parliament as Georgia's sixth president, consolidating the hold of Georgian Dream over the country's levers of power. The source describes the election as controversial and says the opposition treated it as a sham. That is not a minor accusation in Georgia, where the presidency still carries symbolic weight even if the office has less day-to-day power than the government itself. A contested inauguration can therefore become a referendum on legitimacy, not just a transfer of office.
Salome Zourabichvili, the pro-EU incumbent, refused to accept the result. She joined thousands of people across the country in forming human chains to protest the installation of the new president and later said she would leave the presidential palace, but still insisted the new presidency was illegitimate. Her argument was simple: if the election was not valid, then the inauguration was not valid either. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze had already threatened her with jail if she refused to stand aside.
The opposition boycott underlined how isolated the process was. Kavelashvili was the only candidate in the election, which was decided through an electoral college dominated by Georgian Dream. Protesters said the process had been rigged from the start, and demonstrations spread after the October vote and grew further once the government suspended EU membership negotiations. That decision gave the crisis a clear geopolitical dimension, turning a domestic inauguration into a broader struggle over whether Georgia remains oriented toward Europe or moves further into the orbit of a more authoritarian pro-Russian model.
After the ceremony, Kavelashvili praised Georgian traditions, values, national identity, family and faith. That language fit the political style that brought him to office: a mixture of nationalism, social conservatism and resistance to the opposition's claim that the country's European future is being sold off. Zourabichvili, by contrast, framed the new presidency as a breach of legitimacy rather than an ordinary handover.
The result is a presidency that begins under protest, with competing claims to authority and no sign of reconciliation. Georgian Dream has secured another institutional victory, but at the cost of widening the rift with a pro-EU opposition that now sees the country's democratic direction as under direct threat.
That is why the inauguration matters beyond Georgia. It signals which institutions are aligned with the ruling party, which remain in opposition and whether the country continues to move toward Europe or away from it. A president can still be sworn in, but if a large part of the country rejects the legitimacy of the process, the office begins life with its authority contested.
