THE Indonesian leader's rivals have found what they believe to be his weak spots.
INDONESIAN President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono finished the first year of his second term yesterday beset by criticism from every direction.
The first national leader to serve a five-year term, let alone win a second, since the authoritarian Suharto was forced out in 1998, Yudhoyono still has no obvious outstanding rival or protege to succeed him when the constitution obliges him to retire in 2014.
The huge, disorderly nation has politically stabilised under the 61-year-old former army general, whose reputation as a clean-handed democrat has survived six years in one of Asia's grimiest environments.
The nation's economy is growing at 6.2 per cent and accelerating. Indonesia is expected to attract a record $US13 billion ($13bn) foreign direct investment this year and is widely spruiked as the next large developing nation to reach BRIC (Brazil Russia India China) status.
Under Yudhoyono, Indonesia is reclaiming its leadership role in ASEAN, is a significant member of the G20 grouping, and its relations with Australia have never been better or more reciprocal. But you will not hear much of that in Jakarta nowadays.
Some in civil society, and the student activists who are launching a street campaign to force Yudhoyono's resignation, blame his administration for promoting the extreme liberalisation of the economy and politics, causing inequalities to worsen and conflicts to develop at every level of society.
"If this country was a computer we would be hung up already," says Haris Rusli Moti, a leader of the Petisi 28 campaign that took to the streets yesterday. "We need the courage to reboot. The president must realise he is no longer able to handle this situation. Why doesn't he step down?"
Liberal commentators bemoan that Yudhoyono has allowed political and legal reform to run into the sand, while corruption swirls unchecked through the judiciary, police, parliament and public administration.
His nomination of Jakarta police chief Timur Pradopo to head the national police force has aggravated civil libertarians, who suspect Timur's relationship with the violence-prone Islamic Defenders Front and role in the 1998 Trisakti student shootings. The President reportedly preferred Timur over two more obvious candidates because of his loyalty and disengagement from factionalism. But, characteristically, Yudhoyono neglected to publicly explain his choice, leaving critics to draw their worst inferences.
"He hates debate about questions like this," says a long-time Yudhoyono-watcher. "He doesn't want public debates that generate anger, discontent, loss of face."
The President has remained largely silent during recent outbursts of violent intimidation by Islamic Defenders Front followers against Christian groups in parts of greater Jakarta, and the resumption of mob attacks on communities attached to Ahmadiya, a minority Muslim sect, in various parts of the country.
It was left to Vice-President Boediono last weekend to urge the Muslim "silent majority" to confront radical activists who "will lead us to destruction" , he told a weekend conference organised by Nahdlatul Ulama, the nation's largest Islamic organisation. "We must loudly reject radicalism and return to the original agreement of the founding fathers of the nation . . . although Islam is the religion of the majority of people, Indonesia is not an Islamic state."
Such forthrightness about religion is rarely heard from Yudhoyono of late. But to be fair, many moderate Muslim clerical and scholarly voices have been similarly restrained.
Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second largest Muslim organisation, recently convened a seminar of national opinion leaders on the nation's political ills, at which chairman Din Syamsuddin, a respected scholar, pronounced: "We are experiencing a crisis of leadership because our leadership is weak.
"From an Islamic political perspective, it is the leaders who should be held responsible for what is happening."
But voters are yet to turn on their leader, according to opinion polling. Yudhoyono's personal approval rating, although slipping, still tracks above the 61 per cent vote that re-elected him for a second five-year term in 2009.
Most polls also show his Democratic Party would win a higher share of the vote than the 21 per cent that made it the largest party in the House of Representatives last year.
Yudhoyono's support, however, wears thinnest where education levels are highest, according to the Indonesia Survey Institute, and is strongest in villages and rural areas of eastern Indonesia and Sumatra.
These apparent paradoxes are explained, says Jakarta political analyst Kevin O'Rourke, by a large gap in expectations between the opinion-makers and the mass of voters.
The urban middle classes, for instance, mark their governments hard on providing public infrastructure and reliable services, such as clean water, which the poor masses have not experienced and therefore don't demand.
"They are very discerning but they have a completely different set of priorities from the political elites," says O'Rourke. "They want stable prices and jobs and they want the government to stop stealing. By delivering those a leader can be very popular."
Yudhoyono may be more popular than he deserves to be, O'Rourke suggests, because while prices are relatively stable, employment growth has been disappointing and a staggering 69 per cent of all Indonesian jobs are in the unprotected and pitifully paid informal sector.The independent Corruption Eradication Commission has done the hardest work rooting out public sector corruption, while under repeated attack from compromised police, prosecutors and MPs. Yudhoyono has been reluctant to publicly defend the commission from harassment.
"Yudhoyono's real strength is that he's not pilfering the government . . . no corruption has tainted him personally in six years and that's six years longer than anyone else of his predecessors, " says O'Rourke.
There is, however, a political character issue at the core of Yudhoyono's problems, manifest in the now-blanketing charges of weakness and indecision, compounded by the difficult twists that have developed in the nation's post-Reformasi political system.
The first leader elected directly by the voters rather than by the House of Representatives in 2004, Yudhoyono finds himself operating in a hybrid presidential- parliamentary system that is difficult to negotiate anyway, and is made more so by his conciliatory instincts.
With his Democrats having only 150 of 560 MPs in the House of Representatives, he needs a coalition of five other parties for a secure legislative majority, though the widely maligned parliament this year has passed only seven of a roster of 70 bills.
Discipline is weak, MPs are prone to taking inducements, and two coalition parties, Golkar and the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, cause the administration chronic difficulties.
Golkar's chairman, tycoon and former Suharto acolyte Aburizal Bakrie, is generally credited with driving the campaign that forced the departure in May of Yudhoyono's most formidable structural reformer, finance minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, who had targeted irregularities in Bakrie Group's operations.
Sri Mulyani's departure for the World Bank was the point at which the President's reputation withered among many reform-minded folk, particularly when he rewarded Bakrie with chairmanship of the coalition parties in parliament, though the Golkar leader continued to undermine the administration on issues that suit his 2014 presidential ambitions.
"People in the parties opposed to Yudhoyono know that he's basically more of a reconciliator than an enforcer: therein lies the essence of the problem," says Juwono Sudarsono, who was defence minister in Yudhoyono's first administration.
"They're hedging on his good-heartedness, they know he's very deferential to democratic precepts [developed] since 1998 and they're misusing his good nature for their own parliamentary and factional interests."
It goes further, according to Juwono, an international relations expert who joined Suharto's last cabinet in 1998 and subsequently served in ministries of B. J. Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid and Yudhoyono.
Yudhoyono has struggled to impose himself on a ramshackle, sometimes recalcitrant public service from which Suharto's intimidating presence and manner was able to extract results.
Whatever else you thought about Suharto, says Juwono, "the firmness of his personality" compelled implementation of decisions through otherwise impermeable layers of ministries, bureaucracy and military.
"I think this is the problem SBY is facing - because he's courteous, because he's decent, because he's nice - it's not probably the best formula to become an effective leader [of a country such as Indonesia.]"
Although the next presidential race is more than three years away, the poll is already the critical consideration in the contest to shape the conditions of Yudhoyono's final years in office.
As O'Rourke wrote in his Reformasi newsletter, perpetuation of Yudhoyono's general legacy, "namely relatively clean and effective governance" depends on whether or not he can shift the momentum of his sustained popularity behind a chosen successor.
The best opportunity for a rival to succeed in 2014 would be for Yudhoyono's popular support to be dismantled while he was still in office, generating demand for a traditional insider such as Bakrie or, unlikely as it now seems after two presidential losses, Megawati Sukarnoputri or a candidate of her choosing.
Though there is a dearth of obvious successors at this stage, the Democratic side looks to have a lock on potential progressive candidates.
The most obvious successors are Boediono and Democratic Party chairman Anas Urbaningrum, a rising star but at 41 handicapped by relative youth in an age-conscious society.
There is also a shadow campaign to draft Sri Mulyani, but most analysts doubt she has the grassroots appeal or the desire for what would be an even more bruising encounter with raw politics than what she recently endured.
Bakrie, in spite of his wealth and his grip on Golkar, is not yet guaranteed its endorsement or a clear run from the conservative side in 2014.
Media proprietor Surya Paloh, who lost his struggle with Bakrie for the Golkar chair in 2009 has since created the National Democrats, not yet a party but apparently a vehicle for his presidential ambitions.
Juwono, in the meantime, cautions that unless a broadly acceptable civilian transition can be managed, pressure will grow for a retired military officer, working in concert with the political parties, to step forward offering the "firm and focused leadership that this country needs".
That would be a stinging repudiation of the Yudhoyono legacy and a prospect the President has four years to eliminate, providing always that he is able to reverse the course of his unhappy sixth year.
Comments