“I doubt any other Solomons politician feels the degree of animus to Australia that Sogavare does,or is as wedded to China,” Wood said.

The election was mostly fought on local economic issues rather than geopolitical issues such as Chinese influence,Wood said.

Sogavare was re-elected to his local seat,raising the prospect he could continue to wield influence if his party forms a governing coalition.

After visiting Beijing last year,Sogavare declared that China was “the way to go forward” for his nation,and insisted that China did not have strategic ambitions in the Pacific.

The failure of any party to gain an outright parliamentary majority has triggered an intense round of negotiations,with rival politicians and their advisers holed up at chosen hotels in the nation’s capital as they scramble to secure the numbers required to form a government.

Sogavare’s allies have been meeting at the Cowboy’s Grill Bar and Restaurant by the Honiara waterfront.

“We are in the phase when the real bargaining happens,” Meg Keen,director of the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands program,said.

“The game is not over;no-one has the magic number yet.”

However,Keen said the results showed a clear mood for change among Solomon Islands voters.

While Australia and the United States would welcome the end of Sogavare’s prime ministership,Keen said that competition for influence in the Pacific would remain intense.

Sogavare delayed the parliamentary elections for seven months to focus on the Pacific Games,leading to accusations he was backsliding on democratic rights.

University of Queensland emeritus professor Clive Moore,one of Australia’s foremost experts on Solomon Islands,has described Sogavare as intelligent and energetic,but also emotional,“quite paranoid” and “self-serving”.

Sogavare expelled Australia’s high commissioner in Honiara,Patrick Cole,in 2007,declaring him “persona non grata” and accusing him of meddling in local politics.

Former Solomon Islands politician Alfred Sasako suggested there was a mystical element behind Sogavare’s apparent antagonism towards Australia. In 2007,Sasako claimed Sogavare had told him that he had been visited by the spirit of a deceased prime minister who warned him that Australia couldn’t be trusted.

Jon Fraenkel,an expert on pacific politics at the Victoria University of Wellington,has described Sogavare as a “master of the mayhem that so regularly afflicts his country”.

The Solomon Islands,with a population of about 730,000,is one of the Pacific’s poorest countries,with most of the working population engaged in subsistence farming and fishing.

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