Greg Earl, Jakarta – Mudrick Sangidoe points to his colourful new hat before his third audience in as many hours: "My brother brought this back from Chechnya. I wear it to show we are part of the international Muslim struggle for democracy."
The crowd erupts in approval. Their new hero has hit all the right buttons. Democracy for the restless youth. A holy struggle for the pious. Globalism for the emerging Muslim middle class. And a dash of style in a political culture looking for change.
His family might run a batik factory and his Muslim party supporters might favour green, but today Mudrick has worn his new hat with Levi's and a snappy blue shirt. Before a crowd that swings from feudal-looking preachers to wild youths clad in body paint, his clothes only serve to underline his cross-over politics.
As the broker of a proposed alliance between the once moribund Muslim United Development Party (PPP) and disenfranchised supporters of ousted opposition figure Megawati Soekarnoputri, the 54-year-old politician has emerged from the election with a support base that will almost certainly make itself heard again.
Mudrick has built an unprecedented coalition between the two big opposition blocks in Indonesian politics, and the result is that anti-government sentiment is now more focused. It has been an achievement enabled by the Government's strategic blunders.
For almost three decades, Indonesian elections have been dominated by a single overriding message from the Soeharto government: Vote Golkar and develop. It has been a winning formula which, despite the rioting of the past few weeks, would almost certainly triumph again today even if the Government's Golkar Party were forced to give up its privileged access to government and military resources.
But when Golkar wins its much forecast and aggressively sought 2 per cent increase in voter support to about 70 per cent, it will be the people who spurn the Government's rich cocktail of pork barrel and power who will be laying the basis for change in Indonesia. While many foreign businesspeople have an almost mystical belief that Soeharto-style stability will prevail in Indonesian forever, the election has opened a window on the immense religious and political diversity at the heart of the country, which any successful future leader will simply have to accommodate.
Military force remains an alternative means of control, but not one that many people in the armed forces may want to employ on behalf of an untested future president, given the trouble they have had containing protesters despite all the training and preparation for this election.
Dr Herb Feith, who wrote the classic history of Indonesia's 1950s experiment with democracy, says: "As I see it, the central problem of the transition we are now apparently entering is how to involve some or all of the newly emerging groups, whose participation would create a sense of new hope and new vision, while offering reassurance to the main groups represented in the present arrangement."
Over more than 20 years the Soeharto Government has created its own political lexicon in a sustained bid to depoliticise the country in favour of economic development. Indonesia has a floating mass which doesn't worry about politics between elections, "Pancasila Democracy", in which there is no conflict, and a non-government party (not opposition).
But while Soeharto has been remarkably successful in achieving half the plan by weaving a fractious bunch of islands and ethnic groups into a major industrial nation, he appears unable to accept that decades old conventional political differences remain embedded in the modern nation's psyche.
Few people expect the real impact to be felt until the 75-year-old president finally leaves the scene, but the election campaign has wrought three significant changes on his purpose-built political system.
The vote boycott is now a well-rehearsed political tool, despite government efforts to portray abstention as unpatriotic. The carefully structured three-party system has been challenged by the so-called Mega-Bintang (the PPP symbol) alliance between some members of the two non-government parties. And Muslim electoral politics has been enlivened by a mix of radical and new middle-class support for the PPP.
The emergence of Mudrick, the PPP's leader in the central Java city of Solo, says a lot about the way the once politically deft Soeharto inner circle has mishandled the demand for moderate change, underlined by the rise of Megawati, but really extending more broadly in the population.
The PPP and Megawati's loyalists first came together in Solo in January when the provincial governor embarked on a ham-fisted campaign to boost the Golkar vote by painting the town in the party's yellow colour. Under Mudrick's guidance, the anti-Golkar white campaign that followed in Solo spiralled into an unexpected marriage of convenience between some of Megawati's Christian/nationalist/radical supporters and some parts of the Muslim PPP. "This [proposed] merger of Megawati and the PPP is the result of a government mistake," says the Solo broker who has nonetheless ridden this new political horse as far as he can. "It's not really the work of the PPP."
The full implications of these developments will take time to unfold. Initially, a substantial increase in voter abstention will cast a cloud over the legitimacy of the Golkar victory.
Next year there could be support from within PPP ranks when Megawati tries to win back the PDI helm from the discredited leadership, which is backed by the Government. If there is no change in the current of either the PDI or the PPP in response to the election, the demand for new parties or non-party political movements could explode.
But under an alternative scenario, Indonesia may now be facing a two-horse political race between the development-oriented Golkar and the Muslim-oriented PPP. This could be one way to open the system to greater competition, although it would have worrying implications if the Muslim party was always the loser.
Regardless of these outcomes, the real significance of the election is that, under the veneer of uniformly glossy shopping centres and happy rice farmers, political diversity lives in Indonesia. Whether Soeharto bequeaths his successor the means to deal with it will be his epitaph.
Take the election of the government-backed executive committee of the PDI under military supervision last June to replace the popularly elected leader Megawati: even these government-favoured candidates still identified with parties banned decades ago. When newspapers listed the members of this peculiarly short-term New Order body, they could identify each of the committee members as a representative of one of the five parties that Soeharto forced together to create the PDI in 1973.
The list simply demonstrated how many members of both officially allowed non-government parties – the PDI and the PPP – feel a stronger allegiance to political groups which were banned 25 years ago than to the three parties that are the official building blocks of Indonesia's current political system. Or take the campaign machinations of two people who superficially run education or welfare organisations, but who arguably wield more populist power in Indonesia than anyone but the president himself when he is wearing his Father of Development mantle.
Amien Rais, chairman of the modern Islamic group Muhammadiyah, was publicly kicked out of the presidential establishment shortly before the election because of his views about the Busang gold scandal – and has been subsequently busy burnishing his reformer credentials under the cover of the election campaign.
Although he is not a political candidate, students reportedly carried Amien's picture at some Yogyakarta rallies in a potent example of the way long-term political positioning has occurred underneath the Golkar victory. "The public is demanding change. If the poll does not proceed in a direct, free, confidential, honest and fair manner, the people that showed their strength before will do so again and on an even larger scale," Amien warned this week.
Meanwhile, his long-time bete noire and chairman of the traditional Islamic group Nahdlatul Ulama, Abdurrahman Wahid, has used the campaign to slip into the palace establishment after a long time in the cold, and this week endorsed Soeharto's daughter as the next vice-president.
This might look like internecine rivalry between two people most foreign investors would never have heard of, but it is really the re-emergence of a 60-year-old struggle for the heart of Indonesian Islam that Soeharto once suppressed, but which will be a major challenge for his successor.
Or finally, step into the central Java tobacco farming city of Temanggung, which played a cameo role in the campaign as the scene of some particularly bitter clashes between PPP supporters and security forces trying to help Golkar win back the 25 per cent vote loss it suffered here in 1992.
Outside the shell-shocked PPP office, a softly spoken young man approaches a visitor to complain about the lack of jobs for foreign language graduates. But the conversation quickly turns to rumours that the pro-government youth group Permuda Pancasila is about to raid the town to scare recalcitrant Muslim voters from PPP to Golkar.
"But we're not worried about that," the young man says confidently. "For me, this is now a jihad [holy war] for building a democracy. Have you been to Africa? Maybe it will be like Algeria. This is a time bomb and that is the detonator," he says of the Temanggung election violence. A short stroll down the town's gently sloping General Sudirman Street, the aptly named Bambang Soekarno is engaged in a more tactical battle which is really part of a much longer-term struggle for political survival.
As Temanggung head of the pro-Megawati PDI, he specialises in ferrying local villagers to Jakarta for photo sessions with the daughter of Indonesia's charismatic founding President Soekarno. The photos are then treated like religious icons.
In contrast to the holy war under way just down the road, Bambang brings an unexpected Javanese calm to the overheated election. He is more concerned with restoring Megawati to the PDI leadership at a scheduled congress next year, and then to a national leadership position still some years into the future.
He says people do not support Megawati because she is Soekarno's daughter but because they think she will bring a cleaner, more inclusive tone to government that they still associate with Soekarno.
And in a clear message that the Government must make a choice, he says that the existing three-party system will last for some years longer if Megawati returns to the PDI helm. "If Megawati doesn't reappear, there will be many new parties. We will not accept that [her exclusion]. We will protest and fight throughout Indonesia."