The tension between the military and the government went underground from March to May 2006 as Fiji held its tenth general election since independence in 1970.^[11] After several weeks of generally amiable campaigning, but with the usual allegations of vote-rigging and electoral malpractice – which international observer teams deemed far-fetched^[12] – Qarase’s SDL party was returned to power with 36 of the 71 seats in the House of Representatives. The FLP won 31 seats, the United Peoples Party and independents two each. Minor parties and disgruntled independents, who had briefly threatened to upset the conventional wisdom about the dominance of the two main parties, vanished without a trace. The SDL was clearly the party of choice among Fijians, winning over 80 per cent of the Fijian communal votes, compared with 51 per cent in 2001. Qarase’s assiduous courting of the Fijian voters through special assistance programs and grants for the indigenous community, and open appeal to Fijian nationalism, had paid good dividends. The overwhelming majority of the Indo-Fijian voters – 83 per cent – rallied behind the FLP, leaving its main rival among Indo-Fijians, the National Federation Party, the main opposition party up to that point, gasping for political breath.

A narrow but clear victory for the SDL led the country to breathe a sigh of relief. Although it was impolitic to say so at the time of the campaign, the silent, though widespread, feeling in the country was that there would have been rumbling in the countryside, perhaps something more, if the FLP had won the election. Qarase played the race card effectively to rally the Fijians behind him. One of the central planks in the SDL campaign was that Fiji was not yet ready for a non-Fijian prime minister. FLP leader Mahendra Chaudhry became the targeted focus of Fijian animus. Qarase also said that he found the idea of compulsory power-sharing embedded in the multiparty cabinet idea ‘abhorrent’: Multi-ethnic cabinet yes, multiparty cabinet no.^[13]