Vaudine England, Jakarta – Moves to accelerate the constitutional process of finding a new Indonesian president are well under way, promoted by a group of opposition political parties.

Dubbed the "Team Kecil" or "small team", it is led by constitutional law expert Yusril Ihza. The group includes representatives from the anti-Habibie faction of the ruling Golkar party, the National Development Party, National Awakening Party, Justice Party, Star and Crescent Party and the National Mandate Party.

These figures, together with a representative of Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle met at the house of Muslim leader Abdurrahman Wahid last Sunday in a bid to speed things up. The goal is to shorten the present hiatus in national leadership caused by the weakness of President Bacharuddin Habibie and his armed forces chief, General Wiranto, in the face of corruption scandals and the East Timor crisis.

The motive for most of those involved is to bring Mr Habibie's term of office to an end as soon as possible and to demolish any chance he might think he still has of re-election.

Details under discussion by the team focus on bringing the actual presidential vote forward on the agenda of the forthcoming general session of the Peoples' Consultative Assembly.

The Suharto-era schedule for the assembly would see Mr Habibie give his accountability speech, which the assembly would then take time to assess, before formulation of new State Guidelines for the next five years, leading to a presidential poll at the end.

This schedule would leave Mr Habibie in office until at least mid-November. Some team members also are interested in providing the possibility for a faster assembly decision on the status of East Timor.

The idea would be to get rid of that problem as fast as possible by accepting the result of the pro-independence August 30 ballot and ending Indonesia's shame at having foreign troops on what is considered in Jakarta as legally still being Indonesian territory. It remains unclear whether an actual vote on the presidency will be necessary.