On Monday, as Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri took the presidential oath of office with a Koran held over her head, Jakarta and the entire nation were quiet. Aside from several church bombings which may or may not have had a political motive, there were no significant demonstrations protesting Wahid’s constitutional ouster. No province threatened to break away, and most Indonesians simply seemed relieved that the nearly-blind Muslim scholar’s 21 tumultuous months in office were finally over. “The popular mood is that this is a new chance for Indonesia,” says MPR member Sabam Siagian. “Let’s help her out.”
Megawati will need all the help she can get. The former housewife faces a mountain of challenges that would daunt even the most courageous politician. Indonesia’s economy is a mess, corporations and banks are debt-ridden, growth is slowing, inflation is rising and foreign investors are staying away in droves. Poverty is increasing, lawlessness is rampant and separatist rebellions in the restive provinces of Aceh and Irian Jaya are heating up. “She is becoming president of the most difficult country to govern in the world,” says her senior economic adviser Laksamana Sukardi.
And she doesn’t have that much time to prove herself. Most political analysts say that she will have to produce some tangible progress, economic or otherwise, within roughly a 90-day honeymoon period. If she fails, she may face Wahid’s fate as her political allies turn against her. Indeed, Wahid was overthrown by the same coalition of forces that installed him as president in 1999 in an anybody-but-Megawati movement.
As if the nation’s ills were not enough of a burden to bear, she can’t even move into Jakarta’s handsome, colonial-era presidential palace yet. Her isolated and humiliated 61-year-old predecessor is stubbornly refusing to leave the palace, claiming his impeachment was illegal. He remains holed up inside with family members, a handful of loyal cabinet members who have not deserted him and some friends. He shows no signs of budging even though he is totally powerless and has no hope of remaining there. He has been lunching on soybean cakes and fruit, swapping jokes with friends and briefly appeared, dressed in a sports shirt and shorts, on a balcony to wave to a few hundred die-hard supporters gathered on the street outside.
But Megawati is not about to toss her life-long friend out of the palace as ignominiously as she was 34 years ago-at least not just yet. In 1967, when she was just 20 years old she returned to her home at the palace one day to find soldiers tossing her belongings into a truck. Her father, Sukarno-Indonesia’s first president-had been overthrown and he and his family were being forced out of the state house into internal exile. Now Megawati hopes friendly persuasion will work. Her aides are negotiating with Wahid and say they are confident that he will agree to go quietly in the next few days.
Wahid’s squatting in the palace, however, is the least of the 54-year-old Megawati’s worries. Her first major test comes on Wednesday, when the MPR chooses a vice president to fill the vacancy created by Megawati’s sudden rise to the presidency. Political analysts say that the fact that a vice presidential election is occurring so quickly may be her first big political mistake as president. The contest, they say, could drive a wedge in her fragile and fledgling political coalition.
The analysts believe that before she became president she should have cut a broad political deal with her main political allies, the Golkar Party of former dictator Suharto, parliament’s second-largest party behind her own, and the Muslim-based National Development Party, or PPP.
In the view of these analysts, she should have promised a sufficient number of cabinet seats to the PPP to secure its agreement to postpone the vice presidential election until the next MPR session in October. Alternatively, she should have tried to win agreement on a vice presidential candidate who is a respected technocrat and not a politician or a military man. “I think she’s blundered seriously by not making the vice presidency and cabinet positions part of one big package before the election,” says former Attorney General Marzuki Darusman.
Her distaste for such hard political horse-trading may be a fatal character flaw. In 1999, Megawati lost the presidency to Wahid precisely because she refused to cut deals with potential allies before the MPR’s vote. Her failure this week to satisfy the PPP with a guaranteed number of cabinet slots motivated the party’s aging leader, Hamzah Haz, to push for a quick vice presidential vote in the hopes that he would emerge victorious and therefore greatly increase his party’s political clout. But once the vice presidency was on the agenda, Golkar leader Akbar Tandjung threw his hat in the ring as well, thus creating tension within her allies’ ranks even before the coalition solidified.
The result: no mater who wins the vice presidency it could be a big loss for Megawati. If Akbar wins it may detract from her reformist credentials by painting her administration in Suharto-era colors. If Haz wins it could drive Golkar away from Megawati and made her coalition less stable.
Even if the vice presidential vote is not as bitterly partisan as expected, Megawati has a huge task in forming a credible cabinet among the five major parties who supported her for president. First impressions of her leadership team will be crucial since Wahid fell because lawmakers and the public perceived his administration to be corrupt and scandal prone as well as ineffective. “We need to establish a positive sentiment right from the beginning,” says Laksamana. “If the public doesn’t have a good, initial perception of the government then even the best programs in the world won’t make any difference.” As a result, Laksamana says her cabinet must be as squeaky clean as her reputation. “Her basic political capital is for her to remain clean and untainted with corruption and that goes for her inner circle as well,” he says. “Indonesians are simply fed up with corruption.” If there’s any question about the integrity of her team, then the longevity of Megawati’s administration could be as short as Wahid’s.
