Seth Mydans, Jakarta – She is the immovable object of Indonesian politics – stolid, silent, imperious, a puzzle to her countrymen even as she commands unrivalled popularity.

The presidency seems to be hers for the taking, but nobody knows for certain if she really wants it yet. Her deep and dignified silences create a circle of awe around her even as people debate whether they signify subtle political calculation or sheer ignorance.

She is Megawati Sukarnoputri, 54, Vice-President, daughter of Indonesia's founding president, Sukarno, and, to her wildly enthusiastic supporters, "mother of the nation". As the country's politics swirl and clash around her, she looms ever larger and more formidable, seemingly through no doing of her own.

With Abdurrahman Wahid, 60, counting the days of his presidency after a censure vote last week in parliament, it would take only a little push now from Megawati to step into his job.

Wahid faces possible impeachment in the months ahead and Megawati, who commands the largest political party and the strongest popular support, is in a position to set the pace for change. As Vice-President, she would take over if he goes. But few people, even among her advisers, seem to know what she is really thinking. Some of them have suggested that she herself does not know. She is not celebrated for her intellect.

Megawati became Vice-President 18 months ago when Wahid – whom she calls brother – manoeuvred behind her back in an electoral assembly to seize the top position that even he now acknowledges she really deserved. In a general election four months earlier her party had won 33 per cent of the vote in a crowded field, far ahead of Wahid's 10 per cent.

But most analysts blame her for her defeat in the assembly as much as they credit him. As Sukarno's daughter, they say, she sat back, waiting to be anointed in the role she believed was hers by right and destiny.

Her rise to the top now would close a circle. It was former president Soeharto who pushed her father from office in 1967, placing him under house arrest, where he died three years later.

And it was, in effect, Soeharto who created her as a political force, ousting her roughshod from leadership of an ineffective party in 1996 and making a martyr of her.

It is an extraordinary fact of Indonesian political life that her popularity has only swelled since that day, despite her determinedly low profile and persistent silences.

As Soeharto was driven from power, she went shopping. She rebuffed pleas to speak out to calm deadly riots in the months that followed. She habitually absents herself from political fence-mending gatherings. And she has paid little attention to the potentially high-profile duties delegated to her by Wahid.

And yet the most enthusiastic political slogan, by far, in recent years has consisted of frenzied shouts of her nickname, "Mega! Mega! Mega! Mega!" Perhaps, some say, this could only happen in Indonesia, where Javanese culture reveres silence and where power is seen as a mysterious mantle that cannot be seized but envelops a leader of its own accord.

And Megawati seems to have benefited from comparisons. A cruel fact of political life in Indonesia in its time of crisis is the absence of capable leaders; Soeharto systematically neutered the most promising of his subordinates.

"Unfortunately, we don't have the best people at the top," said Goenawan Muhamad, a leading writer and editor. "There's no-one upstairs, no-one upstairs." It is common to speak of Megawati's dilemma: whether to push hard now for her prize or accept a power-sharing deal and wait for the next election in 2004.

Juwono Sudarsono, a former minister in the three most recent administrations, disagrees with the idea of waiting. "It's now or never," he said. "She has the problem of not being sure of the level of her support three years from now. There will be considerable slippage." And if she does not make a clean break with Wahid, she will be tarred with the failure of his administration.

Megawati is a conservative nationalist at heart – in contrast to Wahid, with his libertarian and tolerant instincts. Experts in Jakarta expect her to give the military a freer hand in crushing disturbances, particularly the separatist movements that threaten the integrity of the vast archipelago nation of more than 210million that her father founded.

She would also take over what many see as a thankless, even hopeless, job. Indonesia is still plumbing the depths of its economic collapse and is seething with the rivalries and bloodshed that have filled the vacuum that followed the collapse of Soeharto's dictatorial rule.

And, she is well aware she would be surrounded by the same hungry political animals who have devoured Wahid – including the same coalition of forces that opposed her presidency in the first place.