To her growing legion of fans, Megawati Sukarnoputri can do no wrong, but her critics are not so sure, as Louise Williams reports.
"Be quiet, stop jostling and listen," commands the "princess" of Indonesian politics from atop a makeshift stage in Bogor, West Java, her thousands of sweaty, thirsty devotees packed so tightly into the dusty football field below that the undulating crowd has become one.
Her tone seems a little bossy and patronising, considering the torturous hours the throngs have already spent under the punishing tropical sun, begging desperately for water from the self-important, black-clad security guards ringing the stage.
"Diam, diam, diam," she continues. A less generous translation would suggest she is impatiently telling her people to "just shut up".
But, Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia's founding president Sukarno and political victim of former president Soeharto, can do no wrong in the eyes of the hundreds of thousands of people who have spilled out onto the streets this week to show their support for her Partai Demokrasi Indonesia - Perjuangan (Democratic Struggle Party) in the lead-up to the Indonesia's first democratic polls in more than four decades.
The huge, jubilant crowds, she says, are the product of her long years of building her political credibility by struggling against Soeharto, a particularly personal battle with the man who brought her father down when she was just a teenager.
Her critics, though, are less kind. They attribute her enormous popular appeal not to her own skills or record, but to a dangerous and growing personality cult which has turned Megawati into the "symbol of revenge" for all the excesses, abuses and repression under the Soeharto regime.
This is "short-cut" democracy, laments political scientist Chusnul Mar'iyah from the University of Indonesia.
"This is about populism, not policies. But, Indonesia is facing a very complex and difficult situation. We have 30 million people who have lost their jobs in the last two years; we have seen $US16 billion drained from the nation in capital flight. Whoever is the next president is facing many, many problems. Do we really want to give away a blank cheque based on personality?"
Megawati's critics consider her less than smart. They say she lacks both the charisma and intellect which propelled her father to power and is merely borrowing his legacy. Megawati herself constantly harks back to her father's political ideals and is said to communicate with him using a Javanese mystic as a medium. She has already refused to join in public presidential debates, claiming such direct confrontations do not fit in with Eastern culture, despite the very Western democratic nature of the June 7 polls. In recent months, too, she has adopted a somewhat "diam" policy with the press, turning down virtually all interviews except those facilitated by her inner circle.
The gates of her modest home on Jakarta's outskirts, formerly open to all during her years in the political wildness under Soeharto, are now locked. Another black-clad security guard is posted outside, all puffed up with his new proximity to power. "This is a very traditional power model, especially now that she is the rising star everyone wants to be identified with Mega," says one of her own senior party insiders, of her apparently massive support.
"This personality cult concerns me very much. She is not even in power yet and I am already worried about the potential rise of nepotism. We have to be concerned about who are really the democrats and who are the profiteers, the opportunists attaching themselves to the party."
Her personal lifestyle too, some complain, is not exactly presidential. Fifty-two-year-old Megawati is extraordinarily ordinary. She likes to sleep in, spend her mornings at the hairdressers, take Spanish lessons at home in the afternoon, and attend diplomatic functions in the evening. She formerly worked as a florist and says she enjoyed her years at home raising her now-adult children.
But Megawati is a woman who is comfortable with the label "housewife", and, as such, brings a motherly authority to the political stage. It is possible that this is part of her popular appeal – the tantalising ordinariness of one born into the elite in a society marred by a vast gap between the rich and the masses of the poor.
"Mega will be motherly, composed, full of perceived integrity. With Mega we can replace the evil king [Soeharto], with the benevolent queen. As a symbol she is very strong and the average people in Indonesia still like to feel a distance from their leader, to feel their power," says political commentator Wimar Witoelar.
"Mega is for us, she is for justice, she is for the little people," insist her exhausted supporters, who have been standing in the heat since early morning. That Megawati arrived by helicopter, and lunched at the golf club, matters not at all to Indonesia's "orang kecil", the little people, those so accustomed to being ignored and abused under Soeharto.
"The lower class, the grass-roots level, is so tired of being repressed by the police and the military, and Mega represents struggle to them. The appeal of the anti-[Soeharto]-establishment is very strong," says one member of the Election Commission.
Says Wimar: "It doesn't matter if she takes an afternoon nap, gets up late, goes for her hair-washing or shopping for her special hand cream. She is still the front runner. She is not dumb; she is smart. She doesn't have to say anything, so she doesn't risk making any mistakes. Now, she feels she deserves to be President; that her suffering is her legitimacy."
So is Indonesia in danger of moving another step backwards as it looks to the past for a solution to the problems of the present? Megawati is a traditional, dynastic political leader in a nation in the throes of a painful transition towards democracy. To break with the personalised and corrupt political system built around Soeharto, Indonesia must not only democratically elect a legitimate government, but must rebuild all its main civilian institutions around professionalism and justice.
"Leadership is about managing smart people, not about being the smartest person yourself. People trust her. She had no interest in Soeharto's New Order, she was a victim, and now people are casting around for someone who had no links," says one political analyst.
"If she has a modern, professional group around her and her function is symbolic then she could be a good, unifying president. The biggest worry would be if she tries to play politics herself," says another.
But both her supporters and detractors agree that Megawati Sukarnoputri's PDI-P is the most likely to get the biggest single share of the votes in a fractured, multi-party field in the polls. Megawati has always been an Indonesian princess of sorts. As a young girl she spent much of her time at her father's side in the turbulent '50s and '60s, an experience she says taught her about courage and the reality of politics. When her father was sidelined by a young, ambitious military officer called Soeharto, then forced to step down only to die under house arrest, the Sukarno family made a secret pact never to enter Indonesian politics again.
But, in the early '90s the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia (PDI), one of only two alternative parties permitted under Soeharto law, began to woo Megawati as its leader and the family gave in. Despite numerous attempts to bribe and bully party officials, the then President Soeharto failed to prevent her from being elected to the top party position; and so the Soeharto/Sukarno battle lines were redrawn.
In 1996, however, Soeharto made a major tactical error. His Government convened a blatantly fraudulent PDI Congress which sacked Megawati, allowing Soeharto to ban her and her followers from the 1997 general election. In the process, the Indonesian military stormed the PDI office in central Jakarta, killing scores of Megawati's supporters and sparking serious rioting in the capital. Thus, Megawati the martyr was born.
At the time, confined to her Jakarta home and banned from politics, she merely said: "Politics is a long-term game; this is just one setback." And so she waited.
Megawati herself was not at the PDI offices during the bloody assault, nor was she out on the streets during the demonstrations in 1998 which finally brought Soeharto down. So apparently reluctant was she to rouse protests against the Soeharto regime that she became known as a "figurehead" rather than a leader, and many more-active pro-democracy campaigners were infuriated by her reluctance to take a higher profile - and riskier - position.
But, say party insiders, her absence was part of the strategy. As Sukarno's daughter and a political martyr she was just too valuable a symbol for the party to risk her getting killed on the streets. "When they were attacking her headquarters she was crying, and we were preventing her from going," says one source.
Megawati has been written off many times by political observers as having lost the power struggle against Soeharto. But she just kept on plugging on. She played doggedly within Soeharto's rules; filing court cases in his courts she could never win, complying with his constant bureaucratic harassment and refusing to break the law and give him an excuse to arrest her. As such she displayed a keen political "intuition", and a very deep understanding of the power games behind the scenes in Soeharto's political elite, says an observer.
The problem is that Megawati has always been defined by Soeharto's rules and now Indonesians are looking for a new political system. On issues such as justice and corruption she is widely trusted, but few believe she is a radical reformer.
"What we will probably get from Megawati is much the same kind of system, but it will be cleaner and more accountable," the observer says.
Megawati is comfortable, for example, with the military's prominent role in society, and it is likely the powerful armed forces will swing behind her if she comes out as the single biggest winner in the elections.
She is a determined nationalist and does not necessarily favour a vote on independence in East Timor. In the case of East Timor no-one can now prevent the ballot, but separatist pressures are rising in the northern province of Aceh and in Irian Jaya. Without a fairer system for Indonesia's resource-rich outer islands, any new Government will have trouble keeping the nation together.
And what her own role might be in running the country is unclear. Those close to her say that she relies heavily on experts around her and listens well.
"She seeks advice widely and she trusts her advisers. She is not an intellect like her father was, so she has to trust other people. The problems will arise if she trusts the wrong people, and if she is not able to resist people who are trying to influence her," says one party official. Right now, he says, Megawati's husband is busy trying to put his people in power, a move which could seriously discredit her clean image.
"After the election there will have to be the classic patronage payback; supporters will expect rewards in terms of positions for their loyalty," says a diplomat. "This is not about changing the character of Indonesian society."
Says the party official: "The problem is that if you want to build a democracy, your loyalty has to be to the ideas, not the person, and that is not the case."