Ezra Sihite – A leaked speech by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono from a Democratic Party meeting on April 1 seems to counter suggestions that the president followed the Golkar Party's lead in the decision to delay the price of subsidized fuel.

While the leak has the appearance of a deliberate attempt to counter suggestions that Yudhoyono is a lame-duck president dictated to by his coalition partners, it has raised new criticisms of the president as obsessed over his image.

Opposition parties were quick to accuse Yudhoyono of leaking the speech intentionally to make himself look good. "The government only cares about its public image," Akbar Faisal, a lawmaker from the People's Conscience Party (Hanura), said on Wednesday.

The House of Representatives on March 31 rejected the government's plan to raise the price of Premium subsidized fuel from Rp 4,500 to Rp 6,000 a liter beginning in April.

But in the revised state budget law passed in the early hours of March 31, it says the government can raise the fuel price if the average of the Indonesian Crude Price in the previous six months is 15 percent above $105 per barrel, the assumption set in the budget, or goes beyond $120.75 per barrel.

Yudhoyono's Democrats were the only member of the government coalition to hold steady to the original plan to raise the price of subsidized fuel by 33 percent.

Four other members of the coalition demanded a higher ICP threshold as a requirement for the increase, and another member, the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), rejected the proposal entirely, as did three opposition parties.

Golkar's proposal of a 15 percent ICP threshold was eventually accepted by the other coalition members, leading to suggestions that Golkar was running the show and that Yudhoyono had become a lame-duck president.

In his speech to Democrats on April 1, however, Yudhoyono claimed he had proposed the 10 percent to 15 percent threshold long before Golkar. "The 15 percent threshold was our idea, my idea," Yudhoyono was quoted as saying in the April 1 speech, a recording of which was obtained and published by Tempo magazine on Wednesday.

"Actually, Golkar has promised me it would stop at 10 percent, but again they betrayed us," the president continued.

The Democratic Party has played down the speech and denied it had been deliberately leaked. Saan Mustopa, the party's deputy secretary general, said nothing major was revealed in the speech, but they would still investigate.

"We'll follow up on this," he said. "That meeting was supposed to be internal. We want to know if it was leaked, who leaked it. We won't blow this out of proportion, but we regret this incident."