From macho disaster-movie stars to a couple on a catastrophic date gone wrong, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and victorious rival Bidzina Ivanishvili’s grim-faced first meeting sparked a wave of satirical online spoofs.
Georgian bloggers were quick to produce a series of digitally-manipulated montages of photographs from the visibly tense and unsmiling meeting between the bitter opponents after last week’s elections won by Ivanishvili.
Several of the montages that spread via Facebook showed the two men striding side by side away from a huge explosion, as if in a Hollywood action film – a reference to the fiery showdown at last week’s parliamentary polls that saw a shock defeat for Saakashvili’s party.
Another montage showed them as a couple on a disastrous evening out in a spoof movie poster for the film Date Night, with Ivanishvili, the shorter of the two, wearing a dress.
Although the two leaders have promised a smooth transfer of power after Ivanishvili’s Georgian Dream coalition scored its unexpected election victory, their first post-poll meeting on Tuesday was visibly uneasy and both men spoke of fundamental political differences.