Nino Burjanadze, the former parliamentary chairperson and leader of Democratic Movement-United Georgia party, said early presidential elections should be held.

“In fact today Georgia has autocratic authorities; there is no democracy in the country,” she said while speaking at public TV’s weekly political program, Accents, late on December 24.

In November when Burjanadze inaugurated her party, she said that early elections were needed, but did not specify whether she was demanding parliamentary or presidential polls or both of them.

In the same TV program, Burjanadze again blamed the Georgian leadership for the failure to avert the August war and said military confrontation with Russia was a result of “a huge mistake” of “hot heads” in the Georgian authorities.

She also said that while she was part of the present authorities, she was contributing to peaceful development of events trying to prevent military hostilities.

When asked to specify, Burjanadze responded: “It is really thanks to me that in several cases events did not grow into bloodshed… It was during the Adjara revolution [in 2004], during the Kodori developments [in summer, 2006] and it was this April when we were very close to launch of military hostilities in Abkhazia.”

“I really have no desire – although I am in the opposition – to speak about everything, which may further damage my country’s interests and not the interests of the authorities. In April we were facing a very serious crisis and in April I was the person, who was asking questions to the authorities, because I was absolutely sure that if we would have engaged in hostilities, Russia would have definitely acted and would have defeated severely our army. Unfortunately there were some people [among the authorities] who were claiming opposite,” Burjanadze said.

“Open military confrontation with Russia was a huge mistake of the Georgian authorities and this mistake was a result of presence of hot heads in the authorities, who thought that it would have been possible to finish this war in couple of days,” she added.