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The wheel of politics in Georgia may be close to turning full circle, with Mikheil Saakashvili turning to some of Eduard Shevardnadze's most committed supporters, according to a new round of speculation about the trajectory of Gia Chanturia, the man expected to be the Christian Democrats' candidate for mayor of Tbilisi.

Chanturia has essentially been in exile from Georgia since the Rose Revolution: not least because in the hours following the revolution's triumph he was identified as the man most likely to lead a counter revolution against the Saakashvili-Burjanadze-Zhvania troika that had just taken power.

He has spent those years making himself rich on the back of the rise of the global oil price as the chairman of the Azerbaijani International Oil Corporation. Now, though, the coalition that forged the Rose Revolution irrevocably splintered: one of the three leaders is dead, the other says she is in "irreconcilable" opposition to the third who is looking for any allies he can find. So the Christian Democrats - even though led by a former right hand man of Aslan Abashidze, the Adjaran dictator who fled Saakashvili's threats of war - are the president's favourite opposition party and Chanturia may be being lined up for any number of posts.

It seems unlikely that the president would be happy to see Gigi Ugulava lose the mayoralty to Chanturia, and the principal speculation over the last ten days has been that once that election is out of the way Saakashvili will offer him the premiership. The argument runs that the president would then be demonstrating his willingness to accommodate the "opposition" by forming a coalition, isolating further anyone tempted to protest the result and allegedly demonstrating a tolerance of pluralism that has been so far absent.

From Saakashvili there would be another advantage too: he would have introduced an element of uncertainty into the supposed ascent of Gigi Ugulava to the presidency. Ugulava recently blotted his copybook by telling Newsweek that he would trade Georgia's NATO ambitions for a Russian withdrawal (not even their re-integration) from South Ossetia and Abkhazia and his equally important rejection of presidential ambitions - a quote likely to haunt him for some time to come.

No one expects Saakashvili, assuming he survives in office - to simply quit the stage in 2013 at the end of his term. Recent media shenanigans suggests that the ground is being tested for an abolition of the constitional imposition of term limits, but the regime appeared to back off that and had to rely on lies to even get the story off the ground in any case.

So, could Saakashvili be Ugulava's prime minister - following the path taken by Putin in Russia? Possibly, but the prime minister only serves at the pleasure of the president and a strong successor might be tempted to quickly dismiss the older man. So why not create a sense of rivalry for the presidency, so weakening the claims of either man and keeping Saakashvili very much top of the heap?