Throughout a six-hour interview with AFP, a visibly upset Abashidze said time and again that authorities in Tbilisi were trying to get rid of him the same way they got rid of Georgia's veteran leader Eduard Shevardnadze in late November.
Abashidze, who runs Georgia's Adjara region, spoke on the heels of a national election that saw Mikhail Saakashvili, who led the peaceful protests that ousted Shevardnadze, overwhelmingly elected as the nation's new leader.
In the days after the poll, rumours swirled that groups in Adjara were planning a mass uprising to also oust Abashidze, who supported Shevardnadze throughout the "rose revolution" that saw the president's downfall.
Abashidze took the rumours seriously enough to re-impose a state of emergency, which he first instituted immediately after Shevardnadze's ouster and lifted before the presidential election.
The move followed an arrest of two members of the "Kmara" (Enough) youth organisation, which was instrumental in Shevardnadze's ouster.
"There were also plans for an armed uprising... Saakashvili phoned me and told me that presently he had no need for this. He said he had nothing to do with this... It is a lie," Abashidze said.
The six-hour discussion with Abashidze began as an interview, evolved into a tour of the presidential residence in Adjara's capital Batumi, and ended in an hours-long midnight dinner.
The style was in the best Caucasus tradition (read: laden with dishes) and the wine and vodka came from Abashidze's personal cellar.
Acting the gracious and charming host, Abashidze rejected critics' charges that he is a corrupt, authoritarian bully who runs Adjara like a personal fiefdom.
"I am building things here," he said emphatically. "People are leaving all of Georgia, the situation has deteriorated all over the country, but here, we are growing."
He proudly points to the expanding port in Batumi, to the fact that, unlike the rest of the country, the region enjoys uninterrupted electricity supplies, while crime is low.
Indeed many of these things are true - unlike the rest of chaotic Georgia, basic services are rendered, the low government salaries and pensions are paid regularly and crime is low. On the other hand, there is no dissent to Abashidze's rule and people are afraid to criticise him in public. A popular saying is that Adjara under Abashidze is a miniature model of the Soviet Union.
Abashidze rejected the authoritarian label, saying that he would never persecute people because his family was exiled for 20 years under Stalin.
"I will never be a dictator, I know what a dictatorship is like," he said. "It is impossible to be a dictator here, if you are unfair to one person, tomorrow you'll hear from the whole village."
"But my laws, the laws of Adjara, will be strict and we will
punish everyone who deserves to be punished."
The gracious style of Abashidze the host contrasted sharply with his public image as an erratic regional chief who threatens to further destabilise fractious Georgia, which has two separatist republics.
A short, balding man, Abashidze enjoys driving his own boat and Mercedes. He is fond of giving visitors expensive gifts - he once gave a visiting reporter a commemorative coin from the 1945 Yalta summit that was worth 500 dollars and that featured Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and General de Gaulle.
"He is the most irrational person I've come across. He defines the word megalomania," one Western diplomat in Tbilisi has told AFP.
Abashidze is deeply suspicious of the pro-Western leanings of Georgia's new leadership and wants the country to remain firmly in Russia's orbit.
But in the interview this week, he said he wanted Adjara to remain part of Georgia and has been a victim of provocation's from Tbilisi for years.
"In order to calm myself, I tell myself that this is revolutionary ardour and that it will soon cool down. But this is only to calm myself," Abashidze added.
"It is difficult for me to say what will come next and how relations between the center and the regions will evolve."