Georgia's billionaire prime minister, Bidzina Ivanishvili, looks surprised at the suggestion that he might be a touch sensitive to criticism.
"Quite the opposite," he insists, enunciating his words very carefully, in lightly accented Russian. "I really love criticism! Everyone who knows me knows that." Anyone who has followed Georgian politics recently could be forgiven for believing the opposite to be true. And even the man himself admits that he wishes the populace and media would sometimes be a bit more generous with plaudits, especially given that he has "done everything right" during his year in politics.
"Society should not just criticize; it should also praise the government when it works well," says Ivanishvili, now in a gently hectoring tone. "That should be felt, too, but it is missing from society at the moment." Ivanishvili, who made a vast fortune in 1990s Russia and has been ranked by Forbes magazine as one of the 200 richest people in the world, lived as a recluse until he entered politics in 2011. In elections last October he surfed a wave of popular discontent directed at Mikhail Saakashvili, president of Georgia since the 2003 "Rose Revolution." He united a motley group of everyone from urbane intellectuals to frothing-at-the-mouth nationalists into the Georgian Dream coalition and won an overwhelming parliamentary majority.
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