is first the father of his two young sons and only then the Prime Minister of Georgia. His at this year’s UNGA session has attracted less media attention than the luxurious, unforgettable, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Big Apple that the youthful PM offered his little sons. As the media keeps the anger against corrupt officials at a simmer, the opposition shifts to populism, promising better pensions and social nets.

But is one political dinosaur from the far left – still hard to take seriously – teetering on the 5% threshold election? At least one TV station would have you believe so. Georgian journalists may not always be meticulous, but they are certainly aware that the masses are driven more by emotion than by facts. Nodar Meladze of the opposition-leaning gets this quicker than others.

With rousing music, a fast change of camera angles, and his booming, confident voice – his hands forming a – he creates an electrifying atmosphere for his . That PM took his sons to New York was no secret — he told us himself. “I personally bought economy class tickets for them and myself,” he said proudly, adding that “the state saved ten thousand Lari.

” But Meladze’s team found this hard to believe against the backdrop of the state-funded charter flight that ex-PM Irakli Garibashvili and his son to Munich and onwards to the United States. That story was dug out by Meladze’s team. So they and found that at least the Tbilisi-Istanbul-Tbilisi legs of the ret.