Jakarta – Indonesia's leading politicans sat together on the island of Bali for two days last week dissecting the pros and cons of supporting Abdurrahman Wahid, their controversial president of eight months.

The no-holds-barred discussion would have been unthinkable in the days of former strongman Suharto, who for 32 years ruled Indonesia with an iron fist from behind an almost impenetrable facade.

Suharto seldom spoke – many heard him only on television on national days and once a year before parliament – and anyone who spoke about him did so at their own risk. If any decision was made on leaders, parliamentary or military, coming and going, Suharto made them, and his decisions were unquestioned.

But all that has changed such that Indonesian politics now seems to be standing on its head. At the Bali National Dialogue Forum the discussion among politicians was on whether Wahid himself should stay or go. Everything from intimate details of the 59- year-old president's health and his sometimes erratic style of ruling to the color of his often ribald jokes was held under a spotlight and picked over.

And if the headlines – and the financial indicators – in Jakarta are anything to go by, the relentless spotlight will not move away from Wahid until August, when he appears before the 700-member People's Consultative Assembly (MPR).

At that session, the MPR – the same body that made him the country's first popularly-elected president in October – is expected to open fire at him from all sides.

MPs, ironically more of them from reformist factions that make up Wahid's coalition government than Suharto-hangover parties, have been lambasting Wahid for the past two months, with some calling for his impeachment. Foremost among these has been Amien Rais, the MPR president, who is widely seen as chaffing at the bit for his own bid for the presidency.

The MPs charge Wahid with cronyism, inefficiency, misleading the public with contradictory and "unfounded" statements, letting the government drift without direction and failing to make progress on the economy. They also accuse a president who has visited more than 30 countries in the past seven months with neglecting problems at home to instead whiz round the globe.

Before Wahid defends himself with the president's traditional "accountability" speech at the MPR, the first formal grilling will come in front of the 500-member lower house, which has summoned him to spell out exactly why he fired two ministers in April.

In the Bali discussions, perhaps one of Wahid's strongest defenders, or perhaps more accurately the strongest foe of those attacking the president, was the reform-minded Sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengkubuwono X. The Jakarta elite, the sultan said in disgust, should stop trying to "achieve their own political ambitions" at the cost of the country and unite behind the president's efforts to tackle Indonesia's deepening problems – the bloodshed in the Malukus, the ailing economy, corruption, secessionism in Aceh and a breakway movement in Irian Jaya, to name a few.

"In the people's eyes, the conflict between the political elite has moved into an effort to topple the the present government," he told the Jakarta Post. "Should it be like that when so many people are suffering?"

Nurcholis Majid, like Wahid a respected moderate Muslim scholar and seen in the past as presidential material, who was one of the organizers of the Bali Forum, urged the particpants to help Wahid see his term through to 2004. Wahid, Majid said, was human, and had made mistakes, especially in attempting to "prioritize what should come first." But he should have the benefit of "strong and constructive criticism" rather have to struggle with moves to cut him down.

Majid also urged the participants to realize that the good Wahid had done, ironically including de-sanctifying the presidency, had outweighed the bad. They should realize, he urged, that much of the confusion in Jakarta was due to the country's stumbling first steps to function as a democracy after so long living in a dictatorship.

The only grounds for impeachment, he reminded the forum, were lying under oath or proven corruption. "If Gus Dur [Wahid's popular name] was elected to office until 2004, we must support him," he said. "We have to learn to uphold the constitution."