Known as SBY, Mr Yudhoyono rarely gives media interviews and has an aloof, non-confrontational style that often comes across as plain boring. -- PHOTO: AP
JAKARTA - INDONESIAN President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is seeking re-election on Wednesday, is a dictator's loyal soldier turned leader of a thriving but messy democracy.
Also criticised
MR YUDHOYONO has been criticised for indecisiveness and blinking under pressure from Islamic hardliners.
His Democratic Party also recently supported a controversial anti-pornography bill opposed by religious minorities and liberals.
JAKARTA - INDONESIAN Vice-President Jusuf Kalla, who is seeking to topple his boss Mr Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in Wednesday's elections, is a calculating political operator with a record of pragmatism.
Mr Kalla, 67, dramatically broke his four-and-a-half year alliance with the president in April after Mr Yudhoyono opened the door for rivals from within Mr Kalla's Golkar party to take his place on the election ticket.
JAKARTA - FORMER Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri is seeking a return to the top job on Wednesday, five years after being knocked off her perch by ex-general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Mrs Megawati, 62, who was president between 2001 and 2004, commands a fervent but dwindling following thanks largely to the charismatic aura of her late father Sukarno, Indonesia's first president.
A former senior general during the Suharto dictatorship, the taciturn 59-year-old has become a standard-bearer for Indonesia's haphazard reform push since the strongman's fall in 1998.
Mr Yudhoyono won the country's first direct presidential election in 2004 in a landslide victory over then-president Mrs Megawati Sukarnoputri, for whom he worked as security minister before the pair fell out.
A Muslim from the country's dominant Javanese ethnic group, Mr Yudhoyono is a clear favourite to win the election after four-and-a-half years of relative stability in the unwieldy Muslim-majority nation of 234 million people.
Known as SBY, he rarely gives media interviews and has an aloof, non-confrontational style that often comes across as plain boring.
The only apparent brightness to his persona is a well-publicised sentimentality and a love of music. He has released a number of albums of his own love songs, the latest being a collection of ballads entitled My Longing For You. He also famously cried during a screening of romantic movie Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses Of Love).
On entering office, he took the reins of one of the world's most corrupt countries, weighed down by widespread poverty, separatist insurgencies in Aceh and Papua, and sporadic suicide attacks by the Islamist Jemaah Islamiyah movement. His problems were soon compounded by the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed more than 168,000 people in Aceh and Nias.
But Mr Yudhoyono finishes his term having made progress on most of these problems.
Reconstruction in Aceh has been hailed a success and peace has held in the province after a 2005 foreign-brokered peace deal with separatist rebels.
Jemaah Islamiyah is widely seen as being on the back foot after a string of arrests. Dents have also been made in the country's systemic corruption, although graft remains deeply rooted. -- AFP
