Jeremy Wagstaff, Soreang – This country has endured wrenching change in the past year. Violence is so commonplace that killings of fewer than 50 people often go unreported. Thieves steal hubcaps from cars stopped at red lights. And ex-president Suharto may be about to lose his last prominent position: gazing out from the face of Indonesia's biggest banknote, the 50,000-rupiah ($6) bill.

But one thing hasn't changed much: the intricate political infrastructure that Mr. Suharto lovingly forged during his 32- year dictatorship. That system, which he dubbed the New Order, may have failed at its primary objective – keeping him employed. But its machinery is largely intact as Indonesia prepares for its first free election in 44 years. It poses a direct threat to prospects for real change in June's vote, no matter who is elected.

The New Order, which borrowed alike from Japanese fascism and Javanese kingship, was a pragmatic policy designed to hold together a disparate nation under one autocratic ruler. Its heart was a patronage system reaching out to almost every one of Indonesia's 210 million citizens: from the ruling party, Golkar, to the official club for civil servants' wives; from athletes, to ham-radio enthusiasts, every activity had an organization, and membership was required.

Dismantling the system

Mr. Suharto may be gone, but in and around this small town of Soreang, nestled at the foot of a dormant volcano, the difficulties of dismantling that system are vividly on display.

In April, the village's political bigwigs gathered in the community hall to discuss voter registration. A government official opened the floor to discussion. "Now we're in a transparent democracy," he says. "Everyone can speak up." Yet only the Golkar functionary speaks. He's 56 years old, nearly twice the age of other party representatives. He's the only one here who has done this before: In fact, it's his seventh national election. The first issue on the meeting's agenda is voter registration – is it better to register people door-to-door, or just let them register themselves. "Why don't we do a little of both," the Golkar man says. "That way everyone will benefit." Everyone nods, and the motion is passed.

It's just one decision, but the process is emblematic. Over the course of the two-hour meeting, the Golkar man dominates. Beneath posters exhorting citizens to respect authority and not to draw knives in public, he holds forth on locating polling places and compiling voter lists. The posters share wall space with a chart describing last year's quasi-compulsory campaign to promote contraception: 1,062 local women accepted contraception, the chart says; 328 refused.

Of course, reform has swept away a lot in the year since President Suharto stepped down. The press is free. Forty-eight political parties are contesting June's election; only three were legal under Mr. Suharto. The military has shrunk its traditional highly politicized role – in a big step, it recently gave up its control of the police. And just last week, Parliament passed a bill granting provinces a greater say in government.

Still, there are deep roots that remain to be pulled up, as Dede Radiman knows well. In the village of Wanaraja, 30 kilometers from Soreang, he was one of the New Order's first victims.

On Oct. 28, 1965, Mr. Radiman, then a member of a leftist student group, was at home with his father when a soldier-led mob burst in and hauled them away with hundreds of others. "I had no idea what they wanted; I thought it was all a mistake," the gaunt 62- year-old recalls. His crimes: education, leftward leanings, and a presumed sympathy for Sukarno, the president whose power evaporated less than a month earlier after a coup attempt crushed by then-Gen. Suharto.

His father was released that night. But Mr. Radiman wasn't to see home again for 14 years.

Social control

When he did return, after internal exile for nine years on the remote, malarial island of Buru, he found himself in the harness of an impressive system of social control. Like more than one million other political prisoners, he was barred from government jobs and denied bank credit. He had to report to a military officer every time he left the village, and attend annual indoctrination classes. At election time he was told to vote for Golkar.

Mr. Radiman bore the full brunt of the New Order, but no Indonesian was unaffected by it. Every village was home to an alphabet soup of organizations and officials, including the army's Babinsa, an acronym that means "village guidance officer," whose duties included keeping the local military chief abreast of "unusual social conditions in the village," according to armed-forces instructions. The Babinsas worked with neighborhood associations, known as RTs and RWs, and civilian-defense personnel called Hansip, to keep tabs on everyone who entered or left their territory.

While the system smacks of Big Brother, it also helped to control crime and coordinate daily life in the village. As social commentator Y.B. Mangunwijaya wrote in 1994, it was nothing less than "an extraordinarily efficient instrument for controlling a whole society." The whole network was known as Ipoleksosbudhankamling, or ideological-political-economic-social-cultural-defense-security environment.

The Japanese, who occupied Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies) from 1941 to 1945, introduced the system. It was adopted wholesale by President Sukarno after independence, making Indonesia the only country occupied by Japan to formally retain pieces of the Japanese wartime social system.

But it wasn't until Mr. Suharto effectively gained power in 1965 that the system became uniquely Indonesian. He wrapped the levers of social control in an ideological framework rich with the stiff formalities and rituals of the Javanese court and mysticism.

A masterful achievement

It was a masterful achievement. While playing up his own humble village roots, Mr. Suharto stressed his wife's family connections to Java's ancient royal elite. Together, they were quick to introduce to Jakarta society practices such as the lavish court wedding, where organizers wear matching batik clothes, and the women matching, bunlike hairdos.

Mr. Suharto regularly invoked Javanese maxims during public appearances. His autobiography contains a 10-page appendix explaining Javanese practices and concepts stressing the hierarchy and mysticism of Javanese culture, such as sungkem, or a way of showing respect by kneeling and pressing your face to another's knees.

The result: the New Order gained a patina of continuity that made Mr. Suharto's rule look less like overturning the past, and more like a continuation of the grand Javanese kingdoms. Indeed, such uniformity went beyond weddings: Most civil servants juggled between three outfits: safari suits from Monday to Friday, batik or hand-woven cloth on Saturday, and batik shirts with the Golkar motif on the 17th day of the month. While the Golkar motif may have gone, the practice continues: Even opposition parties today garb their paramilitary guards in camouflage clothing in party colors, with matching epaulettes.

Of course there has been change at the grassroots of the New Order. Angry residents have tossed out village heads by the hundreds. In Wanaraja, people gathered petitions to remove their own headman, whom they accused of corruption. "I heard the rumors, so I resigned first," says the former headman, Momon Kusnadi, a wisp of a man with a voice to match. He denies any wrongdoing.

Still, it was hardly a revolution. The petition's organizers were mostly young village men with little education beyond grade school. Once Mr. Kusnadi was ousted, no one wanted the job.

And the village head doesn't really have that much power anyway. It's an unsalaried position, and the real authority rests with appointed officials, who are still in place. The result: One face changes, but not much more. "A new kind of nepotism," Mr. Kusnadi says.

Superficial changes?

And fear of the system lingers: Villagers circulating the petition say they didn't dare ask for the signature of Mr. Radiman, the former political prisoner, in case they were accused of being "communist" by association. (Communism remains a crime here.) "The change is only small and superficial. Underneath it's the same," Mr. Radiman says.

Back in Soreang, the same people are running the show. People like Rudy Subagio, a handsome 42-year-old who owns several boutiques selling everything from video disks to shampoo-and-sets. He's seen off two challengers for his post of village headman after Mr. Suharto's downfall.

In tone, he bridges the old and the new regimes. He's candid about his background – he was a member of Pemuda Pancasila, a seven-million-plus youth group linked to Golkar and widely considered the New Order's thuggish enforcer under Mr. Suharto. As a government official, he was also a member of Golkar – and still is – but says much has changed. "People from Golkar still come to me to ask me for their support. But this time I should be neutral," he says.

Still, he knows how the system works. At a time when Indonesia's banking system is in near-ruins, he was able to obtain a 500-million-rupiah loan for a farmers' cooperative he set up. Those farmers, he says, will probably now vote for Golkar. The loan is "not directly related to Golkar, but for most peasants they see any government assistance as Golkar's," he says. "For them it's hard to distinguish."

Hard to distinguish, too, is how having a former Golkar member running the local election will foster a level playing field. As village head, Mr. Subagio is one of the officials responsible for ensuring the vote goes well. At the voter-registration meeting earlier this month, he opened the gathering with a few remarks, then retired discreetly to his office at the back of the community center.

After that meeting, seated in Mr. Subagio's plush office and beneath photographs of Mr. Suharto's last cabinet, representatives from other political parties fidget uncomfortably when asked about him. Most decline to comment, even though Mr. Subagio is well out of earshot. Finally one man, Djuli, from the National Mandate Party led by Amien Rais, speaks up. "A lot of people whisper about not being satisfied with him," he says. "But he's still there."

[Special correspondent Rin Hindryati in Jakarta contributed to this article.]