Vaudine England, Jakarta – "We wish a lot of the talking would stop and everyone would just get on with their jobs," said a housewife who lives in sight of Jakarta's green and mushroom-shaped parliament building.

Her view is commonly held as Indonesians reflect on the two years since the fall of president Suharto in May 1998, the three years since economic crisis began to grip and the four years of political chaos since the violent storming of an opposition party headquarters in July 1996.

Daily talk shows on television and random samples of ordinary people reveal a frustration with politics in general and a fatigue brought on by the latest posturing of MPs and presidential hopefuls.

A rare in-depth survey of views across Indonesia's five main cities has helped to prove the point, with almost 90 per cent of those polled saying they felt confused and uncertain when asked who should replace President Abdurrahman Wahid.

Almost 75 per cent said they saw the police and armed forces as incapable of protecting them, revealing a concern about daily life and survival which is more immediate to most than the games politicians play.

This aversion to politics is partly because of a long history in which the majority of people have felt little benefit from manoeuvring at the top. The centralist anti-democracy of Suharto even forcibly curtailed public participation.

Now that overt restrictions, such as those on the press and on free assembly, have been lifted, however, many Indonesians find they are still stuck with a system which at best could be described as feudal democracy.

The feeling finds expression in the common complaint about the antics of "the elite". Even though the members of this political top table – Mr Wahid, Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri, parliamentary Speaker Akbar Tanjung and People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) chairman Amien Rais – wear reformist clothing of varying hues, the growing concern of even their close friends is that maybe these emperors have no clothes.

"Democracy will be reduced to being its own worst enemy if politicians continue to treat it as merely ... power politics," said Aleksius Jemadu, a lecturer in the School of International Relations at the Parahyangan Catholic University in Bandung, West Java. "As we move closer to the annual session of MPR in August, the political elite are increasingly preoccupied with a political drama, the plot of which is simply 'who gets what, when and how'," he said. "The leaders tend to alienate themselves from the very source of their legitimacy, the people."