Northern Ireland goes to the polls today for the second time in 10 months but there is little prospect that the outcome will fix the province's bitter political divisions.
The two main parties both claim they want a fresh power-sharing government installed as soon as possible, but the enmity between them seems entrenched, with neither side prepared to give ground.
Snap elections were called in January after long-simmering tensions boiled over between Catholic, Irish Republican socialists Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party, which is Protestant, conservative and pro-British in its outlook.
"I'd be more pessimistic than optimistic that the DUP and Sinn Fein can get back in a government together quickly," Jonathan Tonge, a Northern Ireland politics expert at Liverpool University, told AFP in a view echoed widely by analysts.
Sinn Fein's deputy first minister Martin McGuinness quit in January, saying he could no longer work with Northern Ireland's first minister Arlene Foster, the DUP leader.
McGuinness resigned in protest over a botched green heating scheme, the breaking point after months of tensions with the DUP.
Foster had instigated the scheme when she was the province's economy minister.
McGuinness is not standing again due to ill health but his successor as Sinn Fein's leader in Northern Ireland, Michelle O'Neill, is showing no sign of softening the rhetoric.
"People are angry at the arrogance, disrespect and contempt," she told Foster on Tuesday in a feisty televised debate.
Gerry Kelly, a Sinn Fein north Belfast candidate, told AFP his party had taken a "huge decision".
"We could have sat on our seats for four of five years, but there were issues that were big enough as far as we're concerned to bring back to the public," he said.
Throughout the election campaign, Foster has appealed for unionists to resist Sinn Fein's demands.
"If you feed a crocodile it will keep coming back for more," she told a party rally.
If the DUP and Sinn Fein end up as the two biggest parties -- as polls predict -- and cannot agree to form a power-sharing executive within three weeks, the governance of Northern Ireland will probably revert from Belfast to London for the foreseeable future.
Aside from handing over budget control, business groups are concerned that would hinder Northern Ireland's ability to attract much-needed international investment and tourism.
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