Georgia's imprisoned former president has announced plans to rebuild the opposition party he chairs as honorary president and under whose banner he ruled the country for nearly a decade.
Mikheil Saakashvili, who is serving a 12-and-a-half-year prison sentence for a range of crimes including abuse of power, embezzlement of public funds and illegally entering the country, said he wanted to create a "modern, youthful, popular movement".
"A party congress will be called at the end of July to elect temporary leadership. I am proposing a Reformers' Council to effectively rebuild the party from scratch and radically transform the United National Movement, getting it back into fighting shape," he said in a post on social media.
The United National Movement (UNM) won around 10 per cent of the vote in the country's 2024 parliamentary elections and was supplanted as the main opposition force by a coalition of several newer pro-European parties.
In his statement on Wednesday, Saakashvili said he wanted to create a political movement that could "withstand the threat of the party's possible formal dissolution", adding that every internal structure would be elected and subject to recall by a universal vote.
Georgia's ruling Georgian Dream party asked the country's Constitutional Court to ban the UNM, as well as two other major pro-Western parties, in late 2025.
Shalva Papuashvili, a senior member of the anti-Western Georgian Dream party, has previously described the UNM as "a real threat to the constitutional order".
A former UNM chair, Levan Khabeishvili, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison in May after calling on Georgians to take to the streets in a "peaceful revolution" ahead of the 2025 local elections.
Saakashvili, 58, served as Georgia's president for two consecutive terms between 2004 and 2013. During his time in office, he strengthened ties with the West, made joining NATO and the European Union central policy goals, fought corruption and privatised many state-owned industries.
However, his United National Movement lost the 2012 parliamentary elections to Georgian Dream amid growing concerns over his government's increasingly authoritarian rule and abuses of power.
After leaving office, Saakashvili moved to Ukraine, where he became governor of Odesa Oblast. In 2018, he was sentenced to six years in prison for ordering the beating of an opposition lawmaker, who suffered severe brain injuries.
He was taken into police custody after returning to Georgia in 2021 and has remained in prison ever since. Saakashvili is currently due to be released in April 2034 after Georgian courts imposed additional prison sentences on him in March 2025.
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