On April 17, 2008, McCain spoke on the phone with Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili about the situation in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two troubled provinces that are considered part of Georgia but have been de facto independent since 1990.
In August 2012, a group of Georgian opposition members used the phrase "Ty kto takoy? Davay, do svidaniya!" targeting president Mikheil Saakashvili in a meykhana of their own, which they sang in Georgian and released for public view.
In March 2004, he was elected to the Parliament of Georgia from Mikheil Saakashvili’s United National Movement party list and has since been a member of a Parliamentary Committee for Education, Science, Culture and Sports.
Mikheil Saakashvili | Israel's 60th independence day celebration in Tbilisi, Georgia attended by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili |
In 2005 Freedom Square was the location where U.S. President George W. Bush and Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili addressed a crowd of around 100,000 people in celebration of the 60th anniversary marking the end of World War II.
Later, Nadareishvili's administration was implicated in some internal controversies and had not taken an active part in the politics of Abkhazia until a new chairman, Irakli Alasania, was appointed by President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, his envoy in the peace talks over Abkhazia.
Guests from previous years have included, between others, Nicolas Sarkozy, Dmitri Medvedev, Hu Jintao, Jalal Talabani, Hamid Karzai, Vladimir Poutine, Mikheil Saakashvili, Abdoulaye Wade, Vaclav Klaus, Pervez Musharraf, Abdullah Gül, Boris Tadic, Viktor Yanukovych, Paul Kagamé, Herman Van Rompuy, José Manuel Barroso, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, etc.
His appointment was the result of agreement between President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili and Minister of Defense Irakli Alasania, who then represented opposing political parties since the defeat of Saakashvili's United National Movement in favor of Bidzina Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition, of which Alasania was a member, in the 2012 parliamentary election.
Among those named in the document notably included Andreas Umland, Stanislav Belkovsky, Taras Kuzio, Gleb Pavlovsky, and former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, among others.
Sandra Elisabeth Roelofs (born December 23, 1968) is a Dutch linguist and the First Lady of Georgia from 2004 to 2013, when her husband Mikheil Saakashvili assumed the presidency.
During U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to Georgia, on May 10, 2005, when he along with President Mikheil Saakashvili were addressing tens of thousands of Georgians in Freedom Square in Tbilisi, a recording of Tavisupleba failed to play properly.
Mikheil Saakashvili's National Movement party played a major role in the so-called Rose Revolution of 2003 which ousted President Eduard Shevardnadze.