Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is in an unenviable position - the son of Singapore's founding father and first premier Lee Kuan Yew, and the successor to 'people's prime minister' Goh Chok Tong, he has to live up to popular expectations while trying to cut his own political swathe.
For someone of Lee Hsien Loong's intellect - he went to Cambridge and Harvard universities, gaining top honours in mathematics, computer science and public administration - the task should be easy. Similarly, as Lee Kuan Yew's son, he has a privileged position in society. Lastly, there is his apparent brilliance as a technocrat, a role he has performed effortlessly for the more than two decades he has been in public office.
So far, though, since taking the prime minister's job 21 months ago, he has seemingly been walking a tightrope, sometimes at ease, at others wobbling precariously, occasionally bolt upright, appearing stiff and uncomfortable.
Last Saturday's general election, his first political test since becoming prime minister, would seem to sum up his predicament - although his People's Action Party, which has ruled Singapore since independence from Malaysia in 1965, again won all but two of the 84 elected seats in parliament, its share of the vote slipped from 75 per cent at the 2001 poll to 66.6 per cent.
Lee Hsien Loong had been seeking 80 per cent of the vote in his constituency of Ang Mo Kio, but ended up taking just 66.3 per cent.
Politicians elsewhere in the world would be more than happy with such figures, but this is Singapore, where the ruling party has ensured that elections go its way. With the voices of political opponents stifled by strict campaigning rules, a state-controlled media, legal action and intimidation, gerrymandering and voting practices such as first-past-the-post, pre-election expectations are rarely unfulfilled.