The opposition supporters were packed tightly in front of the parliament building — scene of the decisive events in the bloodless revolution four years ago — and their leaders said they would not leave until their demands had been met.

“We want our people to be the master in the country, not slaves,” said Shalva Natelashvili, one of the leaders of the opposition bloc. “We need a government which will serve its people and not vice versa as it is now.”

Protest leaders demanded that Saakashvili open discussions with them by Friday evening on their demands, which included early parliamentary elections and stronger opposition oversight for the polls.

Many protesters waved flags with the words “I am not afraid,” the slogan of an opposition coalition formed this year in response to what Saakashvili critics call his authoritarian style and the arrest of a leading political opponent.

Some protesters had brought a mock gallows with Saakashvili’s effigy hanging from it. There was no heavy police presence visible and the mood was mostly good-natured.

Local police tried to block some demonstrators travelling from western Georgia on Thursday, holding up cars and blocking tunnels, local media reported. The authorities said they were respecting the protesters’ right to gather.

A Reuters reporter at the scene estimated there were 40,000 people, roughly the number of people who gathered at the same spot at the climax of the Rose Revolution, a wave of protests that forced then president Eduard Shevardnadze to resign.

The protest organizers and police had not yet given their figures for the numbers of demonstrators.

Opposition leaders said ex-defense minister Irakly Okruashvili, whose arrest galvanized the divided opposition into staging the protest, had been forcibly flown out of the country to western Europe to stop him taking part. Officials said he went abroad voluntarily for medical treatment.

Okruashvili’s exact whereabouts were unclear on Friday.

Saakashvili, who wants to take Georgia into NATO and the European Union, frequently flaunts his democratic credentials. U.S. President George W. Bush has said the country was a “beacon of democracy.”

But critics say that is a facade that masks Saakashvili’s intolerance of dissent and some human rights abuses during his rule, although not on the same scale as in some other ex-Soviet states.

The opposition campaign does not question Saakashvili’s pro-Western stance. But it has tapped into discontent that living standards are not rising as fast as many Georgians had hoped after the revolution.

The opposition want parliamentary elections brought forward to early 2008, instead of late next year. They say they will win and use their majority to abolish the presidency.

“I came to Tbilisi to show our president that many people are not satisfied with him and his government,” protester Iuza Samkharadze from Chiatura, 200 km (125 miles) west of the capital, told Reuters.

“When he was elected as president, I compared him to St. George (the patron saint), but he has disappointed us very much since that time.”

The Rose Revolution triggered similar uprisings in ex-Soviet Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. In both those states, the administrations that swept to office have had their power seriously diluted.

The United States and European Union have a stake in Saakashvili’s rule because they backed the revolution and have since supported the Georgian leader in his bitter quarrels with neighbouring Russia.

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