Georgian tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili's coalition took control of parliament on Sunday after its shock election win this month as the legislature convened in a controversial new building in a provincial city. "It will be the most balanced parliament Georgia has ever had," Ivanishvili's rival, President Mikheil Saakashvili, said as he opened the first session of parliament since his party's election defeat on October 1.
"Georgia has become a normal European democracy for which Europe's doors will open," he said at the parliament in the central city of Kutaisi.
Billionaire Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream coalition has 85 seats in the 150-seat assembly after unexpectedly winning the polls which were praised by the ex-Soviet state's Western allies as a step forward for democracy.
Saakashvili's defeated former ruling party, which had dominated Georgia since the 2003 "Rose Revolution", takes the remaining 65 seats.
"We are not enemies, but political rivals... It is not a time for hatred, it is a time for debates and co-operation," Saakashvili told his opponents in the new parliament after the bitterly-fought election.
Ivanishvili has already been nominated as prime minister by Saakashvili, who will remain president for another year until his two-term mandate ends.
The billionaire, whose nomination is set to be confirmed by parliament in the coming days, attended the opening session as a guest.
"We must do everything to avoid confrontation, we must do everything for co-operation," Ivanishvili told journalists.
As prime minister, he will gain wide-ranging new powers when the presidency's role is reduced under constitutional changes that will come into force after Saakashvili steps down in 2013.
He has vowed to maintain Saakashvili's pro-Western foreign policy and continue Georgia's bid to join Nato and ultimately the European Union.
The legislature met in the $81 million (62 million euro) new parliament building which looks like an giant glass bubble rising from the ground in Kutaisi, an industrial city of 186,000 people.
Moving parliament from the capital was Saakashvili's pet project but proved controversial from the outset, with the opposition questioning the huge expenditure in the impoverished state, while construction was plagued by accidents in which three people died. A woman and her young daughter were killed by flying chunks of concrete in 2009 when demolition workers blew up a monument to Soviet soldiers who died in World War II to make way for construction to begin. Saakashvili's arch foe, Russian President Vladimir Putin, called the monument's destruction a "disgraceful act of state vandalism" and oversaw the building of a replacement version in Moscow.
In a second accident, a construction worker died when scaffolding collapsed in June.
Saakashvili has said that moving the parliament will help to decentralise politics and regenerate Kutaisi, which fell into decay after the Soviet collapse.
But several top Georgian Dream politicians strongly opposed the move and have raised the possibility of relocating parliament back to Tbilisi.