Zubaidah Nazeer – In many ways, the re-election bid of East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta was doomed even before he threw his hat into the ring.
The man the world has come to respect and recognize as the nation's liberation fighter struggled to win over voters from the start and, in the end, came in a dismal 7 percent behind former armed forces chief Jose Maria Vasconcelos, known as Taur Matan Ruak, who finished second in last Saturday's polling with 25 percent.
Vasconcelos will face the top vote-getter, Francisco Guterres, known as Lu Olo, who pulled slightly more than 28 percent, in a run-off in mid-April.
Ironically, observers say cracks began appearing in Ramos-Horta's leadership when he began questioning and criticizing Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao's National Congress for the Reconstruction of East Timor Party (CNRT) over the budget and nepotism.
"The hallmark of Ramos-Horta's presidency over the last two years has actually been that he has been a much better and more impartial president than he had been for the first two," said Jose Texeira, a politician and spokesman for the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor party (Fretilin).
"He began to question the government's failure to deliver and corruption within the government a whole lot more."
But, he said, that put off Gusmao, once a close colleague of Ramos-Horta during the struggle for independence. "His downfall has been that he lost the support of the PM, who switched his support to Taur Matan Ruak," Texeira said.
Ermenegildo Lopes, who leads Bloku Ploklamador, a pro-reform alliance with five places in the 65-seat Parliament, said: "In a way, the President's success in speaking out against injustice and his able performance as a foreign minister and a prime minister before this had raised expectations that he could do more, push for more legislative reviews, question more.
The big blow came when CNRT chose to back Vasconcelos about three weeks before the elections. That left Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace laureate, without an influential ally.
Professor Damien Kingsbury of Australia's Deakin University, an East Timor watcher, said the Timorese have a strong loyalty to political parties. Thus, when a party like CNRT shifts its support, voters also shift their support along with it, even though they have a strong bond to resistance heroes such as Ramos-Horta.
As the president of Fretilin, Guterres has one of the country's largest groups of supporters. In the 2007 presidential elections, he won 27.89 per cent of the vote compared to 21.81 per cent for Ramos-Horta.
But that year, Ramos-Horta had the support of CNRT, allowing him to win the run-off by a landslide, earning 69 per cent of the vote compared to just 30.82 per cent for Guterres. The record number of 12 candidates this time around also hindered the President's campaign, said Lopes.
Finally, analysts believe that Ramos-Horta campaigned too little, too late. The incumbent justified his low-key approach by arguing that the people already knew where he stood on the issues.
His small team of campaigners helped hang banners across the capital Dili while he spoke in some districts and visited organizations and schools, among others. But his efforts were eclipsed by Fretilin's noisy political marches across the capital and Vasconcelo's 180 rallies across the country.
Despite the loss, many agree that Ramos-Horta's political career is hardly over. He is said to be exploring several options, such as writing a book on international relations.
"Ramos-Horta is a person of tremendous ability and good will for our people," said Texeira. "He has certainly done a great deal to bring the political adversaries in the country together to engage in dialogue more."
"Therein lies his great talent, as a diplomat and conciliator. He has much to offer both at national and international level. He will continue to be indispensable in promoting Timor Leste on the international stage."