Also celebrating the disputed electoral victory of Georgian Dream last Saturday was billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. After the country’s electoral commission announced that the party he founded had won 54% of the vote, the oligarch gave a speech that was followed by a fireworks display. Ivanishvili is a Georgian entrepreneur and politician, known for being one of the richest men in Georgia and for his dominant role in the country’s politics in recent years.
Born on February 18, 1956 in the village of Chorvila, the entrepreneur made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, especially in banking, metallurgy and real estate. Over the years, his net worth has been estimated at several billion dollars. Ivanishvili founded the political party Georgian Dream in 2012, as an alternative to then-president Mikheil Saakashvili.
His political influence has been significant, so much so that the party won the 2012 parliamentary elections, allowing him to become Prime Minister of Georgia for a short time, from October 2012 to November 2013. Since his short tenure as Prime Minister, the oligarch , whose wealth is estimated at $7.5 billion in a country whose GDP is $30 billion, has exerted his influence from behind the scenes and is widely described by many Georgians as the country’s “puppeteer.”
The passion for centenary trees
And like many billionaires, Ivanishvili has some pretty eccentric hobbies of his own. One of them is collecting trees, which may seem like a relatively normal passion. The fact, however, is that he prefers enormous, ancient and rare specimens, and is willing to do anything to obtain them and to spend any amount. There is even a documentary that tells the story of this passion of his, Taming the garden, which means taming the garden. As the documentary shows, the chosen trees are torn from the ground, leaving raw patches of denuded soil, and transported at great expense to their new home, the Shekvetili Dendrological Park.
Ivanishvili is not directly named in the film, but his tantrums are the subject of great debate among the Georgian population. Some of them approve of his passion, claiming that he even builds roads to transport the trees, improving the area’s infrastructure. But many others complain about the consequences of what they see as ego-driven environmental vandalism.
Putin’s puppet?
Beyond his extravagant passions, opposition parties, which do not recognize the outcome of the elections, have long accused Ivanishvili of being loyal to Vladimir Putin. Georgia, governed by his party, recently enacted a “foreign agents” law that targets Western gangs, along the lines of what Moscow has done. The country has also enacted anti-LGBT+ legislation that also bears several similarities to laws passed by the Kremlin years earlier. However, several observers maintain that Ivanishvili is a complex character and not a simple puppet of Putin.
“It is appeasing Russia, but I see no reason to suggest that it is owned or operated by Russia, and that is an important distinction,” Thomas de Waal, a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe and an expert on the region, told The Guardian. According to de Waal, Ivanishvili’s tactics mirror those of Viktor Orbán, the controversial Hungarian leader, with both focusing their campaigns on conservative “Christian” values, calling for “peace” in Ukraine but not condemning Russia.
