John Mcbeth, Jakarta – With palace aides already worried about a slide in his popularity, the time has arrived earlier than he would have wished for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to demonstrate a much more assertive brand of leadership.
He must show that he is in charge. How he does this will be important in removing widely-held public perceptions that, while Vice-President Jusuf Kalla's recent election as chairman of the Golkar party may have shored up the President's parliamentary support, the powerful political and economic interests Mr Jusuf is seen to represent have now become the dominant force in Indonesian politics.
"You don't have power if you don't use it," says one senior Golkar executive who, like many party stalwarts, is deeply worried about the impact the election of a relative outsider will have on the fabric of Indonesia's biggest party. "It [the party chairmanship] is a powerful launching pad for anything. In fact, [Jusuf] doesn't really have to do anything by intent. Bambang could be completely isolated. It could all simply happen by default."
For all the widespread misgivings in the Indonesian press, that may be overly alarmist. But even some of Dr Yudhoyono's own ministers worry whether he can match rhetoric with more decisive action. His failure to suspend unpopular Aceh Governor Abdullah Puteh, when he was recently arrested for corruption, and an apparent misstep over calls for an independent investigation into the poisoning death of human rights campaigner Munir, have re-opened the debate over whether he can make timely decisions.
Mr Jusuf's victory over incumbent chairman Akbar Tandjung at the party's December 15-20 congress in Bali was probably less to do with Mr Jusuf and more to do with the outgoing chairman's stubborn and quite puzzling decision to press ahead in an opposition coalition with former president Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P).
As one senior presidential aide told The Straits Times: "There's nothing in the DNA of Golkar for it to be an opposition party. We were counting on that."
And why not? After serving as former president Suharto's political machine, Golkar does not know what it is to be in opposition in a country where the culture frowns on confrontational politics.
It is important to remember as well that Indonesian parties have still to develop the platforms needed to offer an alternative to a ruling administration. Without them, the concept of opposition becomes almost meaningless.
In Mr Akbar's case, it left the impression he was merely engaged in a pointless exercise in revenge – similar to the course taken by ex-president Abdurrahman Wahid at the congress of Nahdlatul Ulama, the Muslim organisation that once served as his power base, earlier this month.
Even some of Mr Akbar's strongest critics could not understand why the stoic 58-year-old functionary continued to hold out. "He should have gone to Mega and told her he couldn't stick with his position because he was being challenged by his own people," says Mr Marzuki Darusman, whom Mr Akbar fired from the party's central executive board for refusing to go along with the so-called Nationhood Coalition.
Mr Jusuf, 64, has never been a strong figure in Golkar, largely because he comes from the minority Sulawesi wing which has never forgiven Mr Akbar for undermining ex-president B.J. Habibie, another native son, in his bid for re-election five years ago.
Money is always an underlying factor in political events like these, but Mr Jusuf is a heartbeat away from the presidency and that was enough for Golkar's regional representatives, some of whom see him as their protector against a wave of corruption charges that has been battering local governments around the country.
They could also have been put off by Mr Akbar's often flagrant efforts to manipulate the party's rules and regulations for his own purposes. Regional leaders also believe Mr Jusuf can use his position to improve their chances in Indonesia's first direct elections for governors, district chiefs and mayors, which begin in the middle of next year.
Why else were there so many questions at the congress about what strategies the party was formulating to strengthen its already dominant hold on local administrations around the country? Golkar currently controls 14 of the 33 provincial governorships and is intent on expanding its influence over many of the country's 440 districts and cities.
Sources close to the President insist that Mr Jusuf was not keen to enter the Golkar race at the last minute. But he was finally persuaded to do so after his anointed surrogate, media baron Surya Paloh, could only muster the support of four of the party's 33 provincial chapters.
Many of the party faithful would have been more comfortable with House of Representatives Speaker Agung Laksono, but in the end it became clear that he did not have the political muscle or the necessary energy to match Mr Akbar, whose standing has rested largely on the perception that he saved the party from collapse after Mr Suharto's downfall in 1998.
While Mr Agung has been appointed to fill the newly-created job of deputy party leader, presumably to carry out many of the functions that the Vice-President will have little time for, he will also have to mend fences among Akbar loyalists in Parliament to live down an act of betrayal; the former chairman had engineered Mr Agung's election as House Speaker in exchange for his promised support at the Bali congress.
According to party sources, there is a hard core of about 30 Akbar followers among Golkar's 128 MPs, enough to cause significant disharmony if they refuse to toe the party's new pro-government line.
There may be other problems as well, which may eventually come back to haunt the party. The secretary-general, a retired army general, is a complete unknown to rank-and-file members, and the newly-reshuffled central executive board is packed with business people and mediocre political hacks who do not reflect regional distribution.
"Golkar has gone back to being a political machine, rather than a party," says one Golkar politician. "There is no solid support for the party, but only solid support for winning an election." Mr Jusuf's victory may well strengthen his position in Dr Yudhoyono's government, but with an unprecedented public mandate as the first directly-elected President, Dr Yudhoyono still wields the real power in what after all is a presidential system.
The Vice-President was always going to be different. It was clear well before the elections that he would be given a much bigger role than his tea-pouring predecessors. It also seems apparent that Dr Yudhoyono chose Mr Jusuf so readily in the first place to lure Golkar into the government fold – even if having him as party chairman was not part of the original calculation.
What remains to be seen now is how and indeed whether the President can avoid looking weak or over-defensive and use the full measure of his authority. The foolish 100-day deadline he set for himself is far too short a time to make a serious judgment about whether he is meeting his objectives.
But premature as well is the dire prediction that now that he has Golkar on board, the political and business interests associated with Mr Jusuf will suffocate him in their embrace and derail his promised second wave of reforms.