The protracted poll count in Indonesia's elections has given the opposition party of Ms Megawati Sukartoputri a hands-down poll victory, with 33.7 per cent of the popular vote.
But the country still has a five-month wait to see who will take power and form a government. And it will not necessarily be Ms Megawati, the 52-year-old daughter of the country's founding President Sukarno, who takes the presidential chair.
Under the country's two-tier electoral system, challenged by many westerners as "undemocratic", a party could, at least in theory, win 90 per cent of the vote and still not be able to form a government.
The election - or selection - of the president in November is in the hands of the 700-member People's Consultative Assembly (MPR). The elected parliamentarians, including those from the Ms Megawati's PDIP, will make up only 462 of the 700, with the rest of the seats filled by 38 military and 200 regional and special interest appointees.
The outcome of the June 7th polls, according to official estimates, gives Ms Megawati's Indonesian Democracy Party-Struggle 154 seats. The ruling Golkar party that the incumbent President Habibie inherited when President Suharto fell from power last year followed with 22 per cent of the vote and 120 seats.
The equation is tailor-made for horse trading, which was under way even before the count was finished, with small parties and the military being wooed, and concerns expressed over political interference in the selection of the other critical 200 appointees.
Although long dismissed by the country's intelligentsia as a political lightweight capitalising on her father's famous name, Mega, as she is popularly known, has earned praise for sticking to her principles.
She has almost closed the door on any coalition or alliance with other reformist political parties, whose support she would definitely need to boost her chances for the presidency.
Her stance against the popular demand for the amending of key clauses of the 1945 constitution, along with her reluctance to usher the military off the political stage and bring Mr Suharto to trial - all key reformist demands - has meant that most reformist groups have withheld their support.
Her opposition to self-determination for the people of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, annexed in 1976, has also not endeared her to student and human rights activists.
In Dili, the East Timorese capital, UN officials and volunteers opened voter registration for the poll on the future of East Timor, but the process was marred by a militia attack.
Mr David Wimhurst, spokesman for the UN Mission in East Timor (UNAMET), said the anti-independence Mahidi militia had
attacked a village in the district of Suai, 110 km south-west of Dili. He said the attack prevented four registration posts there from opening yesterday, the first day of the 20-day voter registration period.
Meanwhile, Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo of East Timor, co-winner of the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize, was expected to arrive in Los Angeles yesterday after he was barred from leaving Indonesia earlier this week, allegedly because his passport was due to expire in less than six months.
Bishop Belo is scheduled to speak today at the University of California, Los Angeles to some 3,000 Catholics attending the National Catholic Gathering for Jubilee Justice.
The bishop shared the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize with the leading East Timor activist, Jose Ramos Horta.