Maia Panjikidze

Early career

Born in Tbilisi, Maia Panjikidze is the daughter of the writer Guram Panjikidze. A philologist trained at the universities of Tbilisi and Jena, she taught German in Tbilisi before joining the foreign service in 1994. Most of her career was associated with the Georgian embassy in Berlin. She briefly served as Deputy Foreign Minister in 2004 and became Georgia's ambassador to Germany from 2004 to 2007 and to the Netherlands from 2007 to 2010. After being dismissed from the foreign service in 2010, she claimed that the decision was made for political reasons after her brother-in-law Irakli Alasania quit as Georgia's ambassador to the United Nations and withdrew into opposition to the administration of President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008.

Opposition

In February 2012, Panjikidze joined the ranks of opposition as a spokesperson for Bidzina Ivanishvili, a multi-billionaire businessman who set up the political party Georgian Dream–Democratic Georgia in order to challenge the incumbent United National Movement in the October 1 parliamentary election. She functioned as the Ivanishvili-led coalition's spokesperson and head of its central office throughout the uneasy election campaign.

Minister of Foreign Affairs

After the Georgian Dream's victory in the 2012 parliamentary election, Panjikidze was appointed as Foreign Minister in the cabinet of now-Prime Minister Ivanishvili on October 25, 2012. In her first comments as a minister, she said Georgia's foreign policy priorities such as the European and Euro-Atlantic integration, strategic partnership with the United States, and good relations with neighbors would remain unchanged. Panjikidze also added that the new government would try to normalize relations with Russia, but Georgia would not restore diplomatic ties as long as Russia, an occupying country, maintained its embassies in Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia.