East Belfast is the perfect territory for a showdown between rival unionists, writes Frank McNally.
In most of Northern Ireland it's not so much who you vote for that matters as who you vote against. Such is their domination of East Belfast, however, that the big unionist parties can afford the luxury of a straight fight without the remotest risk of presenting the seat to nationalists.
They could safely split the vote down the middle if so inclined, although they probably won't. Insofar as the UUP's Reg Empey has any chance of unseating the DUP's Peter Robinson, he will need unprecedented levels of tactical voting by the marginalised "others".
An MP since 1979, Robinson is so relaxed about his own prospects that he can devote time to other major DUP priorities, like finishing off the career of David Trimble.
Robinson was in Banbridge on Monday night launching the campaign to take Trimble's Upper Bann seat and basking in the role of his party's chief strategist. He clearly didn't plan some of the events for which Sinn Féin is now being pilloried, but you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise as he heralded a "complete transformation" in unionist fortunes.
"Today, the pan-nationalist front is in smithereens," he declared, en route to a standing ovation from the Banbridge faithful. "For the first time, republicans are under pressure. We're under no pressure at all. Why? Because David Trimble lost the last election and Ian Paisley won."
The Northern Bank robbery and the McCartney murder were not mentioned. Nor, except obliquely, was the fact of how perilously close the DUP came to sharing power with Sinn Féin. "It was not 'one grubby photograph', as has been claimed," he told his audience, in the nearest thing to a defensive note. "We wanted photographs of every stage of the decommissioning: before, during, and after."
Whatever the number of photographs, Reg Empey will be doing his best to remind East Belfast of how far the DUP-SF relationship had developed before the wheels came off.
He will also stress the positives of the much-debased peace process: "Things are better than they were. There are a lot of people alive today who would have been dead."
And having bucked the trend of the UUP's disastrous 2003 assembly election as part of a ticket that got within 2,000 votes of the DUP, he could buck it again next month by at least getting closer than Robinson would like.
The good news for him is that David Ervine probably won't run this time. The PUP leader is not saying so yet, but informed speculation is that he will let what he calls the "big battalions" of unionism fight it out for his 3,669 votes. Not all these will go to the UUP, but Ervine has been a loud and persistent critic of the Rev Ian Paisley and a strong supporter of the Belfast Agreement. Robinson would prefer him to run again.
The bad news for Empey is that the Alliance Party will field Assembly member Naomi Long in a constituency where it finished third last time around. Worse still, Alliance voters' penchant for sacrificing themselves to the common good is now balanced against a party fighting for political existence.
But the UUP will still be hoping Alliance supporters see the big picture and vote for them, along with the thousand or so SDLP supporters in this unionist monolith.
Whatever threat such tactics pose to Peter Robinson, he will not lose sleep about the voting intentions of Short Strand. Currently the most famous but always the least representative part of the constituency, this is a small island of Catholicism, surrounded by Protestants on three sides and the river Lagan on the fourth. Even before its recent notoriety following the killing of Robert McCartney, the area created a small piece of history in the 2001 local elections by returning East Belfast's first ever nationalist representative, Sinn Féin's Joe O'Donnell.
The seat will now be defended by community activist Deborah Devenny, who also doubles as the Westminster candidate (as does the SDLP's Mary Muldoon). But the general election has yet to impinge here. The posters bedecking lamp-posts on Albertbridge Road conspicuously fail to penetrate the streets of the enclave.
So far, only the dead Pope has his picture displayed - in umpteen front windows - while the dominant cultural symbols are the papal flags flying all along Mountpottinger Road, on either side of East Belfast's most ironically named pub, "the Melting Pot".