The problem with elections, Josef Stalin once observed, is that you never know who is going to win them. The Soviet dictator's one-time student, the late Chiang Ching-kuo, must have had those words on his mind when he launched Taiwan's drive towards democracy in 1987 by lifting martial law. His fears would certainly have been realised had he lived to see his party, the Kuomintang, driven from the presidential office in 2000 and lose its legislative majority last year.
This year, those same words could be coming back to haunt Chiang's successor: Taiwan's 'Mr Democracy', former president Lee Teng-hui.
Sure enough, Taiwan has been given what its people expected of Mr Lee when he took over from Chiang: free and fair elections. They just have not produced quite the result he must have been hoping for.
What they have produced is tough to judge, as democracy is still relatively new to Taiwan. But the results do seem to be falling short of expectations.
Although roughly 80 per cent of the country's 23 million citizens calling themselves benshengren (provincials) are happy to be no longer ruled by the other 20 per cent they call waishengren (mainlanders), they do not seem to be united in their views of how exactly they should be ruled.
This has become evident from the latest round of elections held at the weekend in the municipalities of Taipei and Kaohsiung. Despite claims that the polls were a show of anger against the administration of President Chen Shui-bian, what they really showed was that Taiwan's political battle lines are becoming increasingly etched in stone.
Personalities of the mayoral races aside, look at the statistics. In Taipei, Mr Chen's party, the Democratic Progressive Party, took 28.5 per cent of the vote for the city council. This is nearly the same as the 29.8 per cent it received in 1994 when Mr Chen won the race for mayor, and only slightly less than the 30.3 per cent it took in Ma Ying-jeou's 1998 defeat of Mr Chen. When you combine it with what its partner in the so-called 'pan-green' alliance, Mr Lee's Taiwan Solidarity Union, pulled in, it is 32.2 per cent. The number rises only slightly for representatives to the national legislature from Taipei.