The three parties that had backed a plan for primary to settle the question of who would run for mayor of Tbilisi on behalf of the opposition - the Conservatives, the People's Party and the Movement for a Fair Georgia - have announced that they are to use opinion polling as the basis on which to chose their candidate: but they will only poll on those parties and names who agree to their proposal.
A system of primaries will still be used - to pick individuals to run for the council (sakrebulo) in Tbilisi and also in the Georgian regions.
Koba Davitashvili, leader of the People's Party, but the blame for failing to agree a joint candidate for mayor amongst the opposition on the shoulders of Irakli Alasania and the Alliance for Georgia. He also added that the way was now open for Zurab Noghaideli and his Movement for a Fair Georgia to stand a candidate: leaving the possibility that Noghaideli, who has become a figure of enormous controversy in Georgia after his party signed an up to an alliance with Vladimir Putin's United Russia, might test his own popularity in the poll.
The Alliance for Georgia has objected to both an alliance with Noghaideli - the grouping came close to a permanent fracture after Alasania indicated he was at least prepared to talk to the former prime minister, a decision later reversed - and also to the delay that is proposed for the poll.
Today's announcement was that the result of the poll would be announced on 9 April - still over a month away. The Alliance believes that this delay - whilst good for the minor parties that are part of the grouping becaking the idea, as they will be lavished with media coverage by the regime's television statiopns, especially if they attack Irakli Alasania - will give the incumbent mayor Gigi Ugulava yet another advantage.
Ugulava has been actively running an undeclared re-election campaign - focusing on the issues such as jobs, education, crime and health that matter most to the voters - while the opposition has spent almost all its time arguing about how it should select its candidate.
Nor is it clear on what basis the poll will be taken. If it is a self-selecting ballot, or worse still, an internet poll, its scientific value will be zero and it will be open to manipulation on the grand scale. Unfortunately such "polls" are regularly reported in the Georgian media as though they were of value as opposed to just an interesting diversion. The messages of the cartoon shown here from PhD Comics is yet to break through.
In another video from Transitions Online and Liberali, the issue of the huge growth in social spending in Tbilisi as the election approaches is examined.
As Tamar Karosanidze from Transparency International makes clear the growth of public spending in Tbilisi is all but out-of-control and is simply unsustainable.
But the video also suggests that the public are quite happy with all the extra spending and are not focussing on the long-term doubly debstablising impact of both increasing the deficit at a time when Georgia's external debt has been rocketing and the social reaction that will follow once the government starts to claw back this extra money when the polls are over.
Populist politics clearly works well in the short-term for Georgia but in the long term could do the country enormous damage.
The proposal of the Conservatives, People's Party and Movement for a Fair Georgia that the opposition agree a joint candidate for the mayor of Tbilisi through an opinion poll has failed to win any wider support, reports InterPressNews.
Although Irakli Alasania, leader of the Alliance for Georgia and that group's candidate for mayor of the Georgian capital had indicated his support for such an idea, he later rejected the specific proposal made - which would not have settled the issue of who the candidate would be for another six weeks - as introducing a delay that would only assist incumbent mayor Gigi Ugulava.
Alasania has since formally launched his campaign with a strong show of support from many of Tbilisi's civil society organisations.
The parties behind the proposal - who had earlier proposed a "primary" to select an opposition candidate for mayor of Tbilisi, are expected to announce their next steps tomorrow. If they decide to press on with their candidacies - the Conservatives and People's Party have both nominated their leaders as runners - they can expect to be lavished with television coverage from the regime's TV stations, who will be anxious to damage Alasania's prospects. But few believe their candidates have any realistic chance of offering a serious challenge to Ugulava.
The events of recent weeks, though, have injected a new bitterness into opposition politics - not least over attitudes to Zurab Noghaideli and Nino Burjanadze's trips to Moscow - and it is not clear if anyone will be willing to back down.
Once again the state-controlled media in Georgia are giving more time to events in a foreign country - Russia - than in Georgia.
Previously the target of their venom was Zurab Noghaideli, now it is Nino Burjanadze, whose decision, seemingly taken close to the last minute, to meet Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, unleashed a torrent of abuse on last night's evening news bulletins - the first fifteen minutes of the 9pm Kurieri bulletin on Rustavi 2 were essentially given over to people attacking her.
If the earlier demonisation of Noghaideli is any guide then we can expect more to follow - such as mock executions.
But Burjanadze's decision to meet Putin also caused consternation in some parts of the opposition where there had been a more muted reaction to her initial decision to go.
The ex-speaker did little to build alliances by telling reporters as she left Georgia that she was engaged in "big politics" while they were grubbing around in a battle over trivialities such as the mayoralty of Georgia. But in meeting with Putin she had crossed the line in the views of many.
Gruzia Online, reports on the Berdzenishvili brothers (unfortunately it does not make clear which one), leaders of the Republican party, saying: "Since she, inside the country, did not have sufficient support [to win elections], she attempts by using the Russian factor to achieve goal ... Actually what has happened is that one of the authors of November 7 [when Georgian police attacked peaceful demonstrations] proposes war game [ie Gigi Ugulava who played at beinga general in the war of August 2008], remaining two - then chairman of parliament [Bujanadze] and premier [Noghaideli] - servitude of Russia. None of of these of ways is right. None of these ways is correct. The way of Georgia is the same, as that taken by Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Rumania and other countries. Now they are part of both NATO and in the European Union. The only thing that will protect us from Russian aggression is the North Atlantic alliance."
Georgia was a late-comer to the rise of the emerging economies not really showing any significant economic growth until after the Rose Revolution in 2003.
And growth in Georgia was not significantly based on industrial production either (as the graphs below show), but on property and financial services, the terrible twins of the global boom and bust – fuelling each other’s growth on the upswing as banks lent money secured against rising property values.
Of course this process – which represents a transfer of money from those without property to those with it – can only go on for as long as those without are prepared to bet on property prices going up. If they lose confidence or simply can no longer afford to pay the whole pyramid collapses leaving bankers and property speculators ruined alike.
And that is just what happened, beginning in a small way in the Spring of 2007 and then spreading like contagion throughout the global financial system in 2008.
In Georgia this calamity was intensified by the events of August 2008 and the political instability caused by military defeat and popular anger at an authoritarian and out of touch administration.
Massive US and European financial aid bailed out the Georgian economy – sending external financial debt soaring (see graph).
But to pay that debt will require a return to growth and at rather more than the 2% the IMF are projecting for 2010.
In the meantime, the arguments in Tbilisi about the impact of property development are still raging, reports Matthew Collin for the Moscow Times, who reports that while Mikheil Saakashvili talks of making Tbilisi into a Paris of the Caucasus – and that the authorities have made some progress in restoring parts of the Old Tbilisi to fin-de-siècle glory – fears remain that the glass and concrete of the property developer will be given priority over the city’s vernacular architecture.
Gigi Ugulava's "New Life for Old Tbilisi" campaign, where residents are paid to leave their homes in the old city to release land for property development, has already raised this fear, as has Mikheil Saakashvili's view that glass skyscrapers in downtown Tbilisi will somehow make it less likely that Russia will attack Georgia.
That fear is heightened by the fact that although the global property market is flat on its back and the developed world’s banks are still struggling to emerge from the credit crunch’s effects, there is no sign that the Georgian government have moved beyond looking for property investment as their key source of foreign funds. The temptation must be to make easier for developers to clear old buildings out of the way and start from scratch.
The stream of announcements from ministers keeps coming – these days generally involving money from the Middle East. But the still large numbers of building sites in Tbilisi where work seems to be on a permanent pause or moving ahead at little better than a snail’s pace suggests that cash is hard to come by.
The three parties that had backed a plan for primary to settle the question of who would run for mayor of Tbilisi on behalf of the opposition - the Conservatives, the People's Party and the Movement for a Fair Georgia - have 
y was intensified by the events of August 2008 and the political instability caused by military defeat and popular anger at an authoritarian and out of touch administration.
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