"If he backs down without defending their votes, he runs the risk of pushing those people out of the electoral arena into other options that are not good for anyone."

To their credit, leftist political leaders have returned to the electoral arena and now call for restraint, but their guerrilla allies are stepping up attacks on elected mayors.

The government's record in the electoral arena was equally discouraging for the opposition.

Dix toured college campuses as an "anti-candidate" during the 1984 presidential elections, campaigning "against the notion that anything fundamentally good for oppressed people could be accomplished thru the electoral arena."

Bowles is a cautious executive who had to be dragged into the electoral arena.

"Our experience in the congressional elections really drove home the point that the electoral arena is very much under the control of traditional politicians and the elite," Mr. Agcaoili said.

The senator urged Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore to remove the question from the political debate and to allow the next president to study the matter outside of the electoral arena.

So too did de Gaulle's early decision to take the Rassemblement into the electoral arena.

It called for the extension of democratic principles to the workplace as well as the electoral arena.

Instead the military are using the Muslim brotherhood as a source of domestic stability and as a tool to help demobilise the revolution from the streets into the electoral arena where it can be controlled.