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Last night national TV station Imedi main Kronika news bulletin led on the candidacy for mayor of Tbilisi of an obscure former traffic policeman: does this mean that the regime of Mikheil Saakashvili are now on the verge of panic about the re-election chances of Gigi Ugulava?

Even by the propaganda standards of Georgian TV it was an extraordinary maneouvre: to regard the putative candidacy of man not yet eligible to stand - because he has no political party to nominate him - and who all except a handful of people, mainly in his own family, will never have heard of as the most important story in Georgia.

But Imedi is, these days, on the cutting edge of the Saakashvili's propaganda machine and so we have to assume that it's director-general, Giorgi Arveladze - the former head of Saakashvili's office and the man who ran his re-election campaign in 2008 - ordered the coverage out of some irrational belief that Nika Ivanishvili is a serious player in the coming election but because at the highest level it has been decided that things are not going well for Ugulava.

The three national TV stations regularly give excessive airtime to fringe candidates and small opposition parties as a way of clouding the waters: though they are usually flattering people with party backing, however small, and some sort of political track record. Propelling a nobody into the position of top national news story is not something that has been seen before.

Previously the TV stations - all of which are given financial backing by the government in return for broadcasting pro-regime stories - have devoted significant airtime to the Christian Democrats and the Labour Party:both real parties with consistent if unspectacular levels of support.

Labour, though, have declared they will not take part in the mayoral elections in Tbilisi, so closing off one hope the regime will have had to stop the opposition vote for coalesing around a single candidate. Why the Christian Democrats have displeased the government is less clear, though they seem to be getting less media attention than before: possibly because previous promotion of the party had been rather too successful and they were seen to be eating into the support of the ruling United National Movement (UNM) rather than the non-partliamentary opposition.

It is no secret that many in the UNM wanted to ditch Ugulava as their candidate for mayor: some because they felt he had not been quick enough to set street heavies on the opposition, others because they felt he lacked the personality or charisma to beat an effective opposition campaign without turning to cheating. And cheating is less palatable than before given that the European Union has explicitly announced that a fair election process will be a condition for Georgia's progress to European integration.

But trying to solve the problem but manufacturing candidates seems more than a little desperate.