She could return as the quake-hit Caribbean nation's first elected female leader if she wins an election run-off on Sunday -- but the palace has been in ruins since a massive earthquake more than a year ago.

"Haitians do not want continuity. They want change, to see a rupture from the past," she said in a recent interview with AFP.

The 70-year-old academic and grandmother is a seasoned politician, having been elected senator in 1988 and again in 2006 representing the Rally of Progressive National Democrats (RDNP) party, which she helped found.

Now Manigat is vying for the unenviable opportunity to lead the poorest country in the Americas, a nation that has suffered a seemingly perpetual cycle of political upheavals and natural disasters.

Her rival is popular singer and carnival entertainer Michel Martelly, a 50-year-old political novice who until recently was better known as his on-stage persona "Sweet Micky."

A win would not only make Manigat the first woman elected president of Haiti, but it would also put the country's long-divided opposition in power.

Manigat, who along with her husband has led the RDNP, one of Haiti's better organized political parties, for some 30 years, maintains that she has both the honesty and the gravitas to lead her shattered nation.

"People call me 'Mommy,'" she said in a recent US newspaper interview.

"They know that at my age I cannot be tempted by the perversions of politics like money or dictatorship. People see me as a mature person, someone with experience, and they know very well I am not a puppet."

US-based Haiti expert Robert Fatton, said the stark contrast with the other candidate, Martelly, provides Manigat easy campaign fodder.

"Manigat will probably portray herself as the mother of the nation and paint Martelly as an adventure into the unknown," he said.

A bespectacled law professor who has made education reform a key plank of her campaign, Manigat studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, as well as at the respected Paris Institute of Political Studies.

"You have someone who is clearly very smart, but the question is whether she has the kind of populist touch that is required to win a Haitian election," Fatton said.

Manigat won the most votes in a corruption-plagued first round in which only 20 percent of the 4.7 million eligible Haitians cast ballots.

But Martelly, with broad support among young voters, enjoys a slim lead in the latest opinion polls.

With victory will come the challenge of rebuilding the country following a devastating January 2010 earthquake that flattened the capital, killing more than 220,000 people.

More than 14 months on, hundreds of thousands of Haitians whose homes and livelihoods were obliterated by the 7.0-magnitude quake still live in squalid tent cities, losing hope for the future.

Manigat and her husband, who is now 80, lived in France for 13 years, then Trinidad and Venezuela before settling in Haiti after the ouster of dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier.

Both of her senate terms were cut short -- in 1988 because of her husband's ouster from the presidency and in 2006 when she resigned in protest at disputed elections that saw the current president, Rene Preval, emerge victorious.

She would not be Haiti's first female president -- Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, an attorney, was appointed provisional president following a military coup in 1990 and briefly held the office.

She preceded Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically-elected president, who is expected to make a sensational return to the country on Thursday, just three days before the crucial polls.

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