TAIPEI, TAIWAN — Taiwan's vibrant young democracy seems somber and somewhat deflated today. A large portion of Taiwan's voters clearly doubt the legitimacy of the reelection victory this weekend of President Chen Shui-bian. Thousands of the most vocal doubters, supporters of the losing opposition party, the Kuomintang, have been constantly on the streets of this capital city and other cities protesting the election results since they were announced Saturday evening.

A bitterly divided electorate is not the only factor that could prevent Chen from leading Taiwan effectively for the next four years. Chen's domestic problems are matched by the deepening distrust of Chen harbored by both the dictatorial leaders of China, Taiwan's arch-foe, and the Bush administration in the United States, Taiwan's best friend and only de facto military ally.

Chen finds himself weakened both domestically and internationally despite winning considerably more votes than he did in 2000 when he was first elected president. But even high-level Chen supporters acknowledge that their man's victory was a fluke. They concede that polls conducted by Chen's own Democratic Progressive party, as well as the most reliable independent polls, showed that, by Friday morning, Chen was headed for a decisive defeat at the hands of Taiwan's voters.

That all changed Friday afternoon when Chen was slightly wounded in a bizarre shooting during the last hours of the bitterly fought campaign. Instead of handing Chen a defeat by an expected margin of at least 5-6 percent, shocked and sympathetic voters gave him a razor-thin victory margin of two-tenths of one percent. While some switched their vote, many others who would have voted for the opposition KMT's presidential candidate evidently stayed home.

But now Chen's opponents as well as ordinary Taiwanese are expressing deep suspicions about Friday's shooting incident. Conspiracy theories abound. In addition to several unexplained inconsistencies in the events surrounding the shooting, neither a gun nor a gunman was found even though a short-range handgun was evidently used.

For several hours beginning Saturday evening and continuing until daybreak Sunday, the future of Taiwanese democracy itself seemed in doubt. A violent political impasse loomed after Chen's defeated opponent, Lien Chan, bitterly demanded that the election be declared null and void because of irregularities and of uncertainty surrounding Friday's shooting. By Sunday afternoon, cooler heads in the KMT leadership were pulling back from Lien's rash brinksmanship and insisting only on a complete recount. Privately, in fact, KMT moderates said they expected a recount as well as any judicial intervention would confirm Chen's victory. They said they would accept such an outcome as legal and definitive even though they emphasized their view that Chen's entire campaign and the final results were grossly unfair.

(Sunday night, Lien was still refusing to accept the election result, which will force the proud but colorless politician to end his long career and make way for younger, Taiwanese-born leaders who are not committed to the principle of eventual unification with China. Lien's brinksmanship, undermining Taiwan's fledgling democracy, marked an unseemly end to a long public career. But one can understand his fury over being denied the final prize because of an unexplained shooting. What's more, the incident had prompted an island-wide security alert that prevented 200,000 just-mobilized members of the KMT-leaning security forces from voting. In addition, a record-high 330,000 spoiled ballots dwarfed Chen's 29,000-vote victory margin.)

A prominent member of Taiwan's