Jim Della-Giacoma, Jakarta – Indonesia's ruling Golkar party has predictably nominated ageing President Suharto to lead the country into the next century, but the question of who will succeed him remains, analysts say.

Suharto, 76, was expected to be the only candidate offered to the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) next March, guaranteeing him a seventh five-year term as leader of the world's fourth most populous nation of 200 million people.

But analysts said public discussion of who will eventually fill his shoes remains largely taboo.

"It's a surprising thing, that except for a few lone voices, there is no thought about what comes after Suharto," one foreign diplomat said.

"You would have thought that this would have been the bread and butter of political debate, but in fact there is very little discussion of it," he said.

The two exceptions to the rule are the iconoclastic scholars heading mainly-Moslem Indonesia's leading Islamic groups, between them representing more than 50 million followers.

Nahdlatul Ulama's Abdurachman Wahid and the Muhammadiyah's Amien Rais, both vocal government critics, have been marginalised by Suharto and noticeably left out of an MPR stacked with the relatives of high officials and other Suharto appointees.

"In politics, the most important agenda is for Indonesia to see a transfer of power from a government whose state leadership is a personalised one to one which is wholly institutionalised," Wahid was quoted as telling the Jakarta Post newspaper this week.

However, in the lead up to the March presidential election, discussion is focused on who Suharto will choose, or accept, as his vice-presidential running mate.

The vice-president would automatically succeed Suharto if the president were to die or was incapacitated.

The present vice-president is former armed forces commander Try Sutrisno, but none of Suharto's deputies have ever served two terms.

While various names are mentioned, no favoured front-runner has emerged for the job. Rais advocates a "national agenda" to protect natural resources, develop human resources, promote clean government, narrow the rich-poor gap and preserve national unity.

He concedes that during Suharto's 30-year rule there has been unprecedented political stability and economic growth, as well as advances in health and life expectancy, but he argues that a "national agenda" is needed as there is more to be done.

"This is the agenda for the post-Suharto era. At the time, we will need an alliance of social and political forces that are clean," Rais, also a university lecturer, told the Jakarta Post.

"This is not something that can be done by the armed forces or by Golkar single handedly. I am sceptical that the current players will be able to carry out the agenda for the nation in the future," he said.

But political analysts say that omnipresent Indonesian armed forces (ABRI), with its unique dual function doctrine giving it both a military and socio-political role, does not have an open strategy for a post-Suharto Indonesia.

Staff at the state-run Indonesian Academy of Scientists complained privately that in a recent discussion with ABRI's socio-political chief, Lieutenant-General Yunus Yosfiah, they got only "New Order speak" and cold war anti-communist rhetoric.

"No one in the military is prepared to say anything, the standard line being it is too dangerous for their careers. One of the consequences of Suharto's dominance is that intellectual political activity in society has dried up," a Western diplomat said.

Rob Lowry, associate director of the Australian Defence Studies Centre, an authority on ABRI, argued in a recent paper that undoubtedly the military did have contingency plans to maintain order during the succession.

"It may also have a very general political contingency plan. However, given Suharto's dominance, it is unlikely to have a detailed political game plan designed to impose a successor or plan for subsequent reforms," Lowry wrote.

"There is unlikely to be any significant political reform, let alone progress towards liberal democracy, before Suharto departs the presidency," he concluded.