Today, he stands as the shaky party leader of a ruined battlefield, blamed as the "bad guy" in most opinion polls, with a political credibility close to zero after he recently adopted far-right positions.
Hours before the results were announced in an election that was supposed to solidify Liberia's shaky peace, opposition leader Winston Tubman said he would not accept the outcome of this week's presidential runoff.
Yasir Arafat's command compound here was a wreck today after a six-hour Israeli assault that sent a tank shell through his bathroom, killed two people, left half a dozen buildings in ruins and rendered the position of the aging Palestinian leader shakier than ever.
At the beginning of the year, Westerwelle's position as FDP leader looked shaky amid internal opposition.
The state is shaky, and its civilian leader, Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, is new and untested; Islamist terrorist groups, their allies in the Pakistani intelligence service, and the military are all serious alternative power centers.
Yet Ukip's strategy to target the Labour leader looked shaky after speaking to shoppers in Royton's precinct on Tuesday, many of whom claimed never to have heard of Corbyn.
His internal support remains solid despite a shaky stretch for a leader who has managed to confound and frustrate Democrats and President Obama for much of the past two years, even when Democrats controlled a 60-vote bloc that was, theoretically at least, sufficient to overcome a Republican filibuster.
The election would herald the end of the shaky coalition the two leaders formed after the disputed 2008 election, when Mr Tsvangirai - the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) - boycotted a run-off after claiming he had been robbed of victory during the first round.
A recent speech by Daniel Libeskind has reanimated a debate among architects over the ethics of working in countries with repressive leaders or shaky records on human rights.
