John Aglionby, Dili – When East Timor's 600,000 voters head to the polls Monday for the first round of a presidential election they do so aware that their choice will resonate far beyond which of eight candidates they select to fill the largely ceremonial position.

Everyone is convinced that after the nation collapsed into anarchy a year ago, how they vote will set the tone for a general election expected in the next four months and which will therefore determine the five-year-old nation's future.

Last year's crisis, which began with an army mutiny, saw the poorly run police force implode and communal violence erupt on the streets of Dili, the capital. Three dozen people were killed and 150,000 were forced to flee their homes.

Order has been restored since the deployment of 2,500 international troops last May and the massive expansion – including the arrival 1,748 international police officers – of what had been a United Nations mission focused mostly on planning its exit. But as a five-year-old East Timor and its 1m people seek to avoid becoming a failed state, tensions remain high this election season.

"The situation is [now] calm but the calm is superficial," says Atul Khare, the head of the UN's mission. "The situation is volatile and it is tense. [It] is a post-conflict country with unresolved issues."

All election participants expect a significant redrawing of the political landscape this year.

Fretilin, the leftist ruling party that won 57 per cent of the vote in the only previous general election, in 2001, believes voters are going to flock to it and its presidential candidate, Francisco "Lu Olo" Guterres, to lift the country out of its mess.

For his part, Mr Guterres is convinced he will win majority support in Monday's vote and thus avoid a run-off.

"We have not yet got to the point where we are mature enough to rotate power," says Filomeno Alexio, a Fretilin central committee member. "Fretilin is like a banknote, with two sides that cannot be separated. On one are the people, on the other the state institutions."

With no opinion polls taken, the result is impossible to predict. But virtually everyone outside Fretilin believes the only real question is how big a defeat it will suffer.

"In 2001 there was political euphoria," explained Julio Pinto, the executive director of the East Timor Institute for Security Studies, a local think-tank. "For 24 years [during the brutal Indonesian occupation that ended in 1999] Fretilin had been banned and so everyone ran to them. Yet now it is fractured and there has been little economic progress."

Fretilin's biggest opponent is Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel laureate who took over as prime minister after last year's crisis forced Fretilin's Mari Alkatiri to step down amid charges that he and political allies helped engineer at least some of the violence. The other leading contender is Fernando de Araujo of the Democratic Party.

Allied against Fretilin with Mr Horta – although neither will say so publicly – is Xanana Gusmao, the revered former guerilla leader who is now president. Mr Gusmao plans to run for prime minister in the general elections as head of a new party, the National Congress for the Reconstruction of East Timor, or CNRT, of which Mr Horta's campaign manager has been elected secretary-general.

In an interview with the Financial Times last month, Mr Gusmao lashed out at what he dubbed the corruption and incompetence of East Timor's Fretilin-led political elite. "People suffered sev-erely for 24 years and they hoped that independence would bring something new and better, but it hasn't," Mr Gusmao said.

"Indonesia used to kill and lie, but the economy continued to function. Now we're independent it doesn't anymore."

Observers say that Mr Gusmao's decision to challenge Fretilin has created an entirely new political playing field. "For the first time in this country, the two big bulls are coming to clash," says one senior diplomat. "For the first time people are going to have to choose between [Mr Gusamo and Fretilin]."

Many ordinary East Timorese are eager to see a change. "The people here are certain the [2006] crisis was triggered by the national leadership," says tailor Deonsius da Silva, referring to the 5,000 people he shares a refugee camp with in Dili. "So what we need is new leadership."

But whoever triumphs in the days and months to come, Mr Gusmao's new party is a positive development, Mr Horta says. "Whichever [wins the general election], you will have a real balance, whereby whoever governs cannot govern with absolute disregard for everybody else," he says.

"This has been the case for the past five years, where [under] Fretilin everybody became enemies."