Norimitsu Onishi, Jakarta – It is the political relationship that has long mystified Indonesia's chattering classes, one whose ups and downs regularly send tremors throughout the capital, and one whose future is intricately tied to this country's.

Going from allies to rivals to allies yet again, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Aburizal Bakrie, the chairman of the main opposition party and one of Indonesia's richest businessmen, appear to be enjoying a period of uneasy truce. To most political observers, Bakrie, who plays tennis every day, now has the advantage.

Yudhoyono, 60, long known for cautiousness and indecisiveness despite being re-elected last year in a landslide, has been disappointing supporters with his tepid backing of anticorruption efforts.

When Tempo magazine recently reported that high-ranking national police officials had bank accounts holding millions of dollars in allegedly illicit funds, its offices were firebombed with Molotov cocktails in the kind of attack rarely seen since Indonesia began democratizing in 1998. Yudhoyono's only response was to instruct the national police to investigate the officials itself.

Bakrie, 63, a legendary political and business survivor, has again defied gravity by orchestrating the expulsion of a highly respected reformer from Yudhoyono's government and then being rewarded by the president with a new position that hands him fresh powers.

Bakrie's family business empire prospered under Suharto, the general who ruled Indonesia until 1998, and he is considered by many to be a holdover from that era. His Golkar Party, which Suharto founded as his political vehicle, has regularly tried to block reforms in parliament, even though it is part of Yudhoyono's coalition government. In a recent speech to his party, Bakrie surprised many by urging the party's members to emulate rats. "Be like the rat that bites someone's leg without letting the person know that he has been bitten," he said.

In describing the current balance of power between the two men, aides, perhaps tellingly, have adopted diametrically opposed talking points. While Bakrie's camp plays down his influence, the president's camp emphasizes Yudhoyono's continued relevance.

Dino Patti Djalal, who is the president's spokesman and is soon expected to be named the Indonesian ambassador to the United States, told foreign journalists that Yudhoyono's cautious approach was "a virtue."

Asked about the perception in the news media here that Bakrie had outmatched Yudhoyono, Djalal responded: "I've never seen any indication that somebody or anybody has the upper hand over the president. I know that some people might think that from some events, but it's definitely not the case."

Lalu Mara Satriawangsa, a spokesman for Bakrie and a deputy secretary general of the Golkar Party, waved away reports about his boss' growing clout. He dismissed Bakrie's new position – as the chief of a coalition secretariat, which is expected to have considerable influence over making policy – as merely handling "communications."

In an interview in his office inside the Bakrie family's business headquarters, Satriawangsa said that the two men enjoyed "good relations" and that Bakrie was "a loyal person."

The men's relationship goes back at least to 2004, when Yudhoyono, a former general, began what at first seemed a quixotic bid for the presidency. Yudhoyono had only a nascent party, the Democrats, and little financial support. But according to news media accounts over the years, which neither men have directly denied, Bakrie became one of Yudhoyono's earliest and biggest backers, even though he was a member of Golkar.

After becoming president, Yudhoyono first made Bakrie his economic minister, a choice that raised eyebrows since Bakrie's business interests include telecommunications, finance, real estate, mining, palm oil and gas. (Bakrie has said that he has played no role in his family's businesses since entering politics in 2003, but he has openly fought for policies favorable to his companies since then.)

After Yudhoyono was re-elected to a second and final term last year, Bakrie, who is believed to harbor presidential ambitions for 2014, won the chairmanship of the Golkar Party. The party joined Yudhoyono's coalition government, but relations have grown tense, especially compared with the first term.

Bakrie's party successfully led a campaign to remove one of the most highly respected reformers in Yudhoyono's government, Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, whose ministry had been investigating Bakrie family businesses because they were suspected of evading hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes. Lawmakers, led by the Golkar Party, backed an inquiry into a small bank whose bailout was approved by Indrawati and effectively forced her removal. Before leaving for Washington, where she was appointed a managing director at the World Bank, Indrawati attributed her departure to what she called a "same sex" political marriage between Yudhoyono and Bakrie.

On his blog, Bakrie wrote that Indrawati's departure, Golkar's subsequent dropping of the investigation into the bank bailout and his new position were all unrelated. Yudhoyono's critics have accused him of giving away too much to Bakrie.

Goenawan Mohamad, a founder of Tempo, the newsmagazine that was recently attacked, described recent events as the president's "defeat" to Bakrie.

"A more brutal politician would have stepped back and fought back, just like Bakrie," Mohamad said. "But the president is not a fighter. He's not a gambler. He's not ruthless."

As for Bakrie, he has been battling the perception that he is precisely too ruthless. On his blog, he wrote that his comments about rats had been misinterpreted. He said he did not urge Golkar members to adopt the rat's rapaciousness, but to emulate its reputed habit of assailing quietly and assiduously, unnoticed by its enemy.

"What I meant was the rat's tactical nature," he said, "not its greedy nature."