Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Jakarta – Shortly after taking office in the autumn, President Abdurrahman Wahid, who is nearly blind, quipped to group of visitors in the presidential palace that he and his taciturn vice president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, made "the best team". "I can't see," Mr. Wahid chortled, "and she can't speak."

For the first 10 months of his presidency, the joke was true enough. Mrs. Megawati, 53, the populist daughter of Indonesia's founding father, Sukarno, stayed in the political shadows, avoiding policy debates and government administration. Out of choice and Mr. Wahid's insistence, she was relegated to ribbon-cutting events and other ceremonial duties.

Now, faced with mounting parliamentary criticism of his disorganized and impulsive leadership style, Mr. Wahid is thrusting Mrs. Megawati into a new role. In a concession to fend off legislators who are pushing for his ouster, the president said he would relinquish responsibility for the day-to-day operations of his government to his vice president.

The announcement immediately elicited cheers from legislators. But now, many legislators, political analysts and ordinary Indonesians are wondering just how much responsibility the president intends to hand over, and whether Mrs. Megawati will be able to do a better job than Mr. Wahid of shepherding the unwieldy bureaucracy of the world's fourth most-populous country.

"This move creates more questions than answers," said Kusnanto Anggoro, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization in Jakarta. "Will she be able to name her own cabinet? What sort of authority will she have? None of this is clear."

Sorting out such issues is of paramount importance to Indonesia, which is struggling to embrace democracy after more than three decades of authoritarian rule while simultaneously coping with lingering effects of the Asian financial crisis, separatist rebellions and escalating sectarian violence.

No matter what their political stripe, almost everyone here agrees that strong leadership from the top is the first step in fixing Indonesia's ills.

Already, Mr. Wahid, Mrs. Megawati and their rival political parties are bickering over just how such a power-sharing arrangement will work. Mrs. Megawati's supporters, for instance, want her new role to be codified in legislation, worrying that Mr. Wahid's promised presidential decree could be revoked with one signature. They also want her to have authority to select cabinet members and determine set policy objectives. Mr. Wahid's backers contend that a law spelling out her expanded duties would be unconstitutional, and that the president isn't really going to give up any of his authority over issues as important as making cabinet appointments.

Speaking at a religious gathering in Jakarta on Friday, Mr. Wahid appeared to back away from his earlier announcement, saying that he would not confer any new powers upon Mrs. Megawati. "The division of labor between the president and the vice president has been misunderstood," Mr. Wahid said. "What has been given is not power but tasks. The power is still in the president's hands."

Mr. Wahid then said he would not accept any parliamentary decree spelling out a division of labor. In response, legislative leaders said Mr. Wahid risked a new confrontation with Parliament next week.

"If it's only a presidential decree, he can change his mind at any time," said Eros Djarot, a former top adviser to Mrs. Megawati who is still close to her. He said she and leaders of her political party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, were pushing for her to have broad authority. "If he is selecting the cabinet and she is running the government, can you imagine what kind of mess it's going to be?" he asked.

Political insiders also question just how close the relationship between Mr. Wahid and Mrs. Megawati really was. Although the president remarked in his state of the nation speech that he and Mrs. Megawati have been "as older brother and younger sister for many years," tensions between the two date back to October. Although Mrs. Megawati's party won a plurality of votes cast in the parliamentary election last year, Mr. Wahid, whose party only got 10 percent of the vote, managed to outmaneuver her in assembling a coalition to support his presidential bid.

Since then, the relationship has continued to deteriorate. He has made jokes about her rumored extramarital affairs, and in the spring he fired one of her closest confidants and chief economic adviser, Laksamana Sukardi, the minister of state enterprises. Later, in a move that further alienated his vice president, Mr. Wahid accused Mr. Laksamana of corruption without providing any evidence.

Today, say well placed political sources, the two barely talk. Mrs. Megawati even refused to read Mr. Wahid's state of the nation speech to Parliament on Monday. "It's hard to imagine them working together," one source said. "She feels like he has stabbed her in the back."

In fact, Mr. Wahid initially did not want to confer the responsibilities on Mrs. Megawati. Instead, he wanted to create a new post of "first minister" that would have run the cabinet and reported directly to him, but Mrs. Megawati's party, which controls the largest number of seats in the Parliament, objected to the move, fearing it would dilute her power.

To force Mr. Wahid to accede to her wishes, Mrs. Megawati has done the politically unthinkable in Indonesia, forming an alliance between her party, which was the most prominent opposition group during the rule of former president Suharto, and the Golkar party, Mr. Suharto's onetime political machine. Officials on both sides, however, play down the rapprochement as a temporary move to pressure Mr. Wahid.

But Mrs. Megawati's critics question her poor record in handling of the one big issue Mr. Wahid entrusted to her: ending the religious fighting in the Moluccas.