Anthony Spaeth – No one doubts that Suharto will win big in next week's election, but volatile Indonesia already is starting to plan a political future without him

Every five years, Indonesia goes through a process the government has dubbed a "festival of democracy." Candidates speak, crowds rally, pop singers entertain and, at the end of it all, a parliament is voted in. The democracy part has always been a sham: the People's Consultative Assembly is largely unelected, only two opposition parties are allowed and these are kept on a short leash. But no one could deny the festive aspect. Election campaigns were a time of fun, dancing, free food and a day off from work.

Not this time around. Campaigning concludes this week for national elections in an Indonesia turned remarkably tense and disgruntled. Suharto, 75, the country's President since 1967, proscribed campaign rallies altogether in fear of protest against his rule. Across the island of Java, where 70% of Indonesia's 200 million people live, the campaign has sparked provincial mayhem, in which opposing party members have attacked each other and confronted the armed forces in almost daily clashes. In the populous province of Central Java, workers for Suharto's ruling Golkar have been commanded to cover everything in the party's official color. Tree trunks, traffic circles and town-square statues are doused in yellow paint. "Its message," says Cornelis Lay, a political scientist at Gadjah Madah University in Yogyakarta, "is that every government official from the provincial governor down to the village headman is a Golkar member. You should be afraid not to vote for Golkar."

Suharto and Golkar won't fail to win the May 29 vote--by law, it's illegal to boycott an election and the ruling party has already announced the 70.02% share of the vote it intends to receive. But the level of disquiet across Indonesia suggests that Suharto may be in serious trouble after the polls are finished. His era has been marked by impressive management of the country's economy and its key national resources--oil, minerals and timber--increasing financial comfort for millions. But that no longer seems enough for the country's traditionally acquiescent masses.

Never before has criticism of Suharto's regime been so open, with particular rage expressed at the suffocating grip of the country's military. The President's attempt to keep a political rival, Megawati Sukarnoputri, from contesting the elections has backfired, creating a national figure with ambitions far beyond this week's vote. "There is growing sympathy among the people for me," Megawati told Time. "They still want me to be their leader." Also telling is widespread speculation that the President has lost his long-held wahyu, the magic powers thought to accompany a just rule--a concept believed by millions in Indonesia. "Every week, every month Indonesia has instability," says Permadi, the country's leading mystic, whom Suharto attempted to imprison in 1995. "The people know the President has lost his wahyu. Suharto knows his days are finished." Warns Y.B. Mangunwijaya, a prominent Catholic priest and former anti-colonial freedom fighter: "This is a very dangerous period. The Javanese are like volcanoes, smooth and beautiful and laughing and smiling. Suddenly, in one moment, you see the other side--and you don't know when or how the eruption will come."

So it suddenly seems. Just ten months ago, the biggest threat to Suharto's rule were rumblings of a heart disorder, for which he went to a cardiac hospital in Germany for a checkup. Today, Southeast Asia's most alarming news in a decade comes from the 17,000-island Indonesian archipelago. There's an anti-government underground student movement that claims thousands of sympathizers, discernible splits in the military--which is Suharto's traditional power base--and a national opposition figure in Megawati, daughter of former president Sukarno, whom Suharto helped overthrow in 1965 and succeeded two years later. That change of leadership was the only one Indonesia has experienced in the 51 years since gaining independence from the Netherlands. In quelling a 1963 communist coup attempt, the military set off a bloodbath in which some 500,000 people died. For three decades, Suharto has avoided naming a successor, or devising any kind of credible succession mechanism, for fear he would create a challenger to his dominance.

Together, all of these factors imply that the fourth most populous country in the world (after China, India and the U.S.) is riled, unruly--and possibly on the brink of a major political change for which it is unprepared. "There are frightening parallels with the Sukarno period," says Ong Hakkam, professor of history at the University of Indonesia--namely, rising discontent, little evidence the President can defuse it except with a crackdown, and no precedent for him to step down smoothly. Says Trimoelja Soerjadi, a human rights lawyer in the city of Surabaya: "Suharto is riding a tiger and he can't get off. And he hasn't prepared the nation for what comes after him." Trimoelja doesn't hesitate to predict what would happen if Suharto was to suddenly disappear from the scene: "Chaos, certainly."

That's a threat that has been taken seriously in Indonesia for decades. The desire to avoid a replay of 1965's holocaust has long enhanced the public's acceptance of Suharto's tough ways--basic freedoms such as genuine elections and an unshackled press are absent--and of the dwifungsi, or dual function, of the politically active Indonesian military. But the recent torchings of churches and Chinese businesses across Java have coincided with unrest in the provinces of East Timor, Irian Jaya, Aceh and Kalimantan. An escalation of strikes in military-patrolled factories--the army controls the nation's only legal labor union--shows, too, that the status quo is not being accepted anymore, or very staunchly defended. "All this has happened in a situation when the state is very, very weak," says political scientist Lay. Sources in the military tell TIME that some officers have already devised strategies to replace the President if unrest deepens. "Practically speaking, a leader has to die in prison or in bed in our system,"says Hakkam. "Suharto will always be remembered for his exit, not for what he has done. It is sad."

Until recently, it appeared the President would go down in history with a formidable reputation: as the engineer of one of the 20th century's greatest economic success stories--and, considering his family's cut in just about every major business in the land, one of Asia's more corrupt patriarchs. The level of corruption has prompted comparisons with the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, who was forced to flee his country in 1986. But present-day Indonesia is a far cry from the Philippines of a decade ago. Marcos had torpedoed the local economy--half the population didn't have enough work--and anti-Marcos protesters had little to lose, and little else to do but wage street revolution. Suharto's citizens have enjoyed a better fate. When he assumed control of Indonesia, per capita income was $55 and food riots were common. Today, per capita income is $1,300, and nobody is starving. "We have looked at this as carefully as we can," says Dennis de Tray, director of the World Bank's Indonesia office. "You cannot tell me that the benefits of Indonesia's growth over the past 30 years haven't been widely spread. At least 199 million people here are living better than they were ten years ago, let alone 20 years ago."

If they're so much better off, why do so many Indonesians seem so restless? Next week's elections were intended to be as predictable, controlled and undemocratic as the last five polls under Suharto's rule. Instead, they have evolved into the greatest airing of grievances since the mid-'60s. "We can no longer lie to the people," says Subagio Anam, a regional head of the United Development Party, one of the two non-Golkar parties allowed to contest. "Their political awareness is too high now." The complaining is not about jobs, corruption at the top, or even the kind of clamor for democratic freedoms heard in the Philippines in the mid-'80s, or South Korea a few years later. The biggest grievance is about the hardness of Suharto's state, where army-run factories refuse to pay proper wages, journalists are murdered and dissidents tortured, and a built-in constitutional imbalance favors the military, whose families get preference in university admissions and cadge virtually all civil-service jobs. "When I was in the marines, I always felt that dwifungsi was very wrong," says a Brigadier General who recently retired after 35 years. "It has become a monopoly for the armed forces. They've taken away the right of civilians to get good civilian jobs." According to Mangunwijaya, the priest: "The crowd is thinking, 'I have nothing and I am working hard.' The bad guys become big guys. For them this is a world of injustice and corruption." Justice, or the lack of it, is a concept that has come up often in the campaign. Last month, 12 pro-Megawati activists were sentenced to between 18 months and 13 years in prison for "undermining the state ideology and inciting students and workers to demonstrate against the government." Those charges stemmed from anti-government riots that rocked Jakarta last summer. Their lawyer, R. Dwiyanto Prihartono, officially complained about blatant flaws in the legal procedures and about the torture of two defendants during interrogation. His appeal for a new trial was rejected. "The army," says Prihartono, "told me this was not a period for justice." Suharto has not had to confront such problems before. He faces few of the human rights pressures from the West that bedevil dictatorships in China and Burma. Historians will probably say the turn in his fortunes was inevitable with age and a calcified regime. The more sentimentally inclined say the key moment was the death of his wife, Siti Hartinah, in April 1996. Madame Tien, as she was known, had made herself the kindly face of the Suharto regime by building a hospital and a national library and running four philanthropic foundations. Since her passing, diplomats who have seen Suharto at public functions say he appears demoralized and no longer interested in his job.

As Suharto heads toward his political eclipse, analysts are paying close attention to the fortunes of Megawati. As the eldest daughter of Sukarno--the legendary founder of Indonesia, who is credited with instilling the archipelago's hundreds of ethnic groups with a sense of national identity--she has one of the most recognizable names in the country, though for two decades she was content to be a housewife and florist. That changed in 1987, when she ran for the National Assembly as a member of the Indonesian Democratic Party, or PDI, the other legally recognized party. She became PDI chairman in 1993 and intended to run her own candidates in this election on a platform demanding term limits for future presidents and a dismantling of the business empires of the six Suharto children. Whether she could have made an impact in the tightly controlled legislature--57.5% of the People's Consultative Assembly and House of Representatives members are appointed by Suharto--is now moot, for Suharto wanted neither challenges in parliament nor a contentious campaign. Says Amien Rais, chairman of Muhammadiyah, Indonesia's second largest Islamic organization: "Absolute consensus is the name of the game. You cannot expect anyone to give a dissenting voice."

So last June, a group of PDI members met in the city of Medan on Sumatra island in a government-sanctioned effort to vote Megawati out of her chairmanship. Megawati wasn't invited, but Suharto's home affairs minister looked on, even though he isn't a party member. Hundreds of troops and armored cars guarded the meeting. Once ejected from the top job, Megawati had no chance to run for president in 1998, as she had been expected to do. (The president is selected every five years by an electoral college, which combines the People's Consultative Assembly and the House of Representatives.) In reaction, her loyalists laid siege to the PDI headquarters in Jakarta and for several weeks held an impromptu democracy movement outside the building. Anti-Suharto speeches rang out from bullhorns for the first time ever. On July 27, hired thugs dressed in PDI's trademark red T-shirts, but evidently not party members, attacked the building and tried to flush out Megawati's supporters. For three hours, a battle ensued with rocks, sticks and Molotov cocktails. Finally, riot troops had to drag out the dissidents, bloodied and unconscious, dumping them in the street. Some 10,000 onlookers went on a rampage that lasted for almost two days. During that mayhem, the police beat and arrested many, including civil servants who worked at a nearby Ministry of Agriculture building. Their children and neighbors marched into the street and burned it down in protest.

The ultimate victor of that battle was Megawati, who became an instant symbol of oppression under Suharto. During the four-week siege in Jakarta, and afterwards, disparate groups seized on Megawati as a rallying point against the state. They included intellectuals, civil rights lawyers and an underground student group known as the People's Democratic Party, or prd. Those young, often naive, activists, fanned out across Java to preach democracy, and they targeted Indonesians left behind in the economic upsurge: in particular, 19-to-24-year-old uneducated men. (The unemployment rate for young Indonesian males is one of the highest in Asia, partly because factories prefer to employ women, who are more willing to work long hours for low wages.)

Meanwhile, Megawati's lawyers, including 70 volunteers from the Jakarta-based Legal Aid Foundation, filed at least 200 lawsuits protesting her ouster from the PDI chairmanship. They knew they had little chance in court: in case after case, judges issued exactly the same ruling, often using the same words, rejecting the petitions. "I knew I would lose," says lawyer Budi Santosa, who handled one of the cases. "But I thought I must go to court to show the public we have the spirit to fight the government and build democracy."

Megawati is unsure of her future role, but she is still a rallying force in the campaign. (Last week the government banned the display of posters and banners bearing her photo.) Golkar is clearly going to win: all civil servants are required to vote for it, election fraud is historically rampant, and the official body that screened candidate lists last year carefully expunged Megawati's supporters from both the PDI and the PPP lists. But the campaign is nonetheless far less sterile than any in the past. The PPP, a Suharto-forced union of four pre-1965 Muslim-based parties, has actually endorsed her and seen a jump in its popularity. "Megawati's supporters don't know what to do," says James Agus Pattiwael, vice secretary-general of the PDI in Surakarta. "So they support the PPP."

That support has come with a hostile edge. In Central Java's Pekalongan town, crowds rioted in March, destroying the platform from which one of Suharto's daughters was scheduled to speak. Two similar incidents occurred in April. Motorists passing through the town's old quarter now drive under a green banner reading: "You are entering the Path of the Star," a reference to the PPP's star-shaped logo. On either side of the street are scorchmarks, shattered windowpanes--and graffiti accusing "corrupt dogs and warthogs" of ruining the country.

How the post-election scenario plays out is anyone's guess, but there are visible signs--astonishing for a country so tightly controlled--that Indonesia is going to change dramatically during the next five-year Suharto term. Two weeks ago, at a seminar on election reforms, three respected academics announced 25 ways of making the system more democratic. In attendance were high ranking generals and other leading Jakarta figures. When one professor was pressed by the audience on how the system could possibly be improved, he hesitated and then shocked the crowd: "Suharto," he said, "must step down." Recently, the President himself told a group of school children visiting his Cendana palace: "Many people want to see me ill."

Of his possible successors, the Jakarta elite has long kept a running list, which changes each time Suharto promotes or demotes a top general. Some sources say a likely candidate is Vice President Tri Sutrisno, 61, a retired general who keeps as low a profile as his office allows, considering his constitutional status as the President's replacement should Suharto be deemed no longer fit to rule. A senior diplomat says the most likely probability is that a weak transitional figure will take power while rival claimants mobilize their support. Five other personalities, or power combines, are considered as potential replacements:

• Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, 49, Suharto's eldest daughter. Nicknamed Tutut, she is bright, ambitious and respected by the ruling party. In order to succeed, however, she needs military support, which she has garnered in an alliance with Army commander Gen. Hartono, 55. Tutut needs Hartono's support because "she will not be automatically accepted by key elements of society," says a senior diplomat in Jakarta. "There is a special relationship between her and Hartono," says a Golkar legislator. "He hopes Tutut will tell Suharto he's the right man for the job."
• Brig. Gen. Prabowo Subianto, 46, commander of the Special Forces. Prabowo, one of the fastest rising military men in the country, comes from a moneyed family and is married to Suharto's second oldest daughter, Siti Hedijati Hariyadi. But Suharto is said to have lost faith in him since July, when his forces were reportedly moving toward the President's residence as backup during the Jakarta riots, and Suharto suspected a possible coup attempt.
• B.J. Habibie, 50, Suharto confidant. Habibie has led Suharto's ambitious attempt to create an Indonesian aircraft industry and is said to be maneuvering for the vice presidency. He has hitched his wagon to Armed Forces commander-in-chief Gen. Feisal Tandjung, 57, who lacks the support of military rank-and-file and hopes to grow in power through Habibie.
• Megawati. She has the support of the underground movement and lots of public sympathy, but no military champions, with the possible exception of the Marines, former Sukarno loyalists who feel estranged from Suharto. Megawati's five siblings are prepared to take up her mantle if something happens to her. "There's an understanding in the family," she said in an interview with Time in early May.

Other powerful generals might get the nod, perhaps as transition figures. They include Gen. Wiranto, 50, commander of the Strategic Reserve; and Brig. Gen. Bambang Yudoyono, 46, another fast riser.

Shortly after his wife died, Suharto told Habibie he wouldn't run for president in 1998, preferring to spend his final years with his family. He was persuaded otherwise. But three months ago, the president received news that must have made him reconsider. His spiritual advisers informed him that the nail that anchored the island of Java to earth had come unstuck, a sign of impending calamity. By all accounts, Suharto puts great stock in such portents, and in February, he sent a trusted confidant to Yogyakarta, a traditionally mystical site in Java, to perform a ritual designed to repair the damage. It's not known if the President was fully assuaged--or whether he still feels the tremors of a land unstuck.

[Reported by John Colmey and Michael Shari/Java.]