A day after proposing making Georgia’s pro-Western foreign policy course legally binding through passing a law, President Saakashvili’s UNM party offered on January 31 to make such legal guarantees even stronger by introducing a relevant clause in the country’s constitution.

“We welcome the [Georgian Dream] parliamentary majority’s declared desire to remain on the European path of development and offer them to jointly prepare draft of constitutional amendments… to reaffirm that Georgia’s only future is European future and that Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic integration should continue,” Davit Bakradze, leader of the UNM parliamentary minority group, said.

Davit Usupashvili, the parliamentary chairman, said on January 30 after UNM announced about intention to initiate a draft law on “irreversibility of foreign policy course” that Georgian Dream offered UNM on January 18 to launch a work on a joint “inter-faction agreement on foreign policy course”.

“So this process is already launched,” Usupashvili said. “There is already a draft document and if the UNM has a desire to get involved in the process we only welcome it. It is less important what kind of form it will have – whether it will be a law, resolution or an agreement. What matters most is that we should be able to elaborate a long-term strategy in respect of major issues; it is inadmissible to have dramatic changes, especially in the foreign policy, once in four years.”

President Saakashvili said on January 31, that such constitutional amendment was necessary against the background of PM Bidzina Ivanishvili’s remarks in Yerevan, which Saakashvili said, amounted to “Armenization” of Georgia’s foreign policy.

Saakashvili said that such constitutional provision was needed “if we seriously are not intending to play Putinist game about our return to the Soviet empire.”

“I hope that the parliamentary majority will consider this proposal seriously and will not consider it as yet another propagandistic trick, it’s not about PR, it’s about Georgia’s future,” Saakashvili said.

He made the remarks while visiting a factory run by Defense Ministry’s military industrial enterprise Delta.