Irakli Alasania, a key leader of the Georgian opposition, has a sober article published in the Wall Street Journal today, criticizing the authoritarian measures of President Mikheil Saakashvili:

The government enacted a range of economic reforms, many of them successful. However, it made a key miscalculation, thinking that the quickest way to reform was to put unparalleled power in the presidency and weaken the powers of the parliament. Presidential selection of judges ensured a compliant legal system. Tbilisi removed also the local autonomy and local tax-raising powers of municipalities, which contributed to Georgia’s depressingly poor democracy rating in the recent Freedom House assessment. On every indicator, Georgia was either unchanged from the previous year or had worsened. As the report puts it: “Georgia remains a hybrid system in which a parliament loyal to the president fails to curtail authoritarian tendencies on the part of the executive.” (…)