Jakarta – Three brothers who played a crucial role in the re-election of Indonesia's president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, are emerging as a formidable political force with considerable influence on Yudhoyono's party and policies.
The Mallarangeng brothers are household names in a country which only embraced full democracy after authoritarian President Suharto resigned in 1998.
Andi, 46, is literally the voice of the president. Rizal, 45, is a political maverick with presidential ambitions, while the third brother, Choel, 43, is an election strategist who prefers to stay out of sight. All three have political clout, and are seen as future cabinet ministers or even presidential contenders.
In a country where parties, including Yudhoyono's Democrats, are built around personalities, one or another of the Mallarangeng brothers may be groomed to lead the Democrats when Yudhoyono's second, and final, term ends in 2014.
"They have an extraordinary amount of influence in the Yudhoyono administration for one particular family," said Kevin O'Rourke, a political risk analyst.
The Mallarangengs come from South Sulawesi and were born into local politics. Their grandfather was a district regent and their father was mayor of Pare-pare, a city in South Sulawesi.
Andi, a former university lecturer with a PhD in politics from Northern Illinois University, is best known as Yudhoyono's spokesman, and appears on television or radio almost daily.
He was deeply involved in Indonesia's democratic overhaul, helping to rewrite post-Suharto Indonesia's electoral laws and political party regulations. In 1999, he was appointed a member of the General Election Commission which ran the first democratic election in Southeast Asia's biggest economy.
He also worked on Indonesia's regional autonomy laws, giving power to provinces and districts which had long chafed under the control of Jakarta and the dominant Javanese. Those reforms gave him a taste for reshaping the political landscape through policy.
"Every time you see the country changing, and you can make a difference to the process, it is a very meaningful experience," he told Reuters in an interview.
When he accompanied Yudhoyono at a conference of Islamic nations in Senegal recently, Andi said he realized how far Indonesia had come.
"Most of the country leaders there are kings or people who are not elected by their own people. Some were absolute monarchs, some don't have a parliament or some have a parliament that is appointed. Only a very, very few are democratically elected and one of them was us," he said.
State vs free market
While Andi puts himself at the center of the political spectrum and sees the state playing a strong regulatory role, he considers his brother Rizal to be a free-market advocate who wants to reduce the role of the state.
Rizal, who has a PhD in politics from Ohio State University, has hopped from one political camp to another. For this year's elections, he joined the Yudhoyono team as spokesman for vice president-designate Boediono, and is likely to remain an influential adviser in the next Yudhoyono government.
In the 2004 elections, Rizal was aligned with Megawati Sukarnoputri, Yudhoyono's rival, sometimes sparring with Andi in public debates about the two candidates. Last year, Rizal briefly flirted with the idea of running for president as an independent.
"We have to say to our seniors, we respect you, Sir and Madam. But please give some space to our new generation. Now is the time for a new generation of leadership in Indonesia," he said on his campaign Web site.
His bid was widely rumored to be supported by Aburizal Bakrie, a controversial minister and crony holdover from the Suharto era who is seen as representing Indonesia's old-school elite. Ties between Rizal and Bakrie go back years.
In 2001, Rizal founded the Freedom Institute think tank with Bakrie's backing, and he has worked as an aide to Bakrie, whose empire spans coal mines, plantations, property and telecoms.
Bakrie is a prominent member of the Golkar Party, Suharto's former political machine, which was in Yudhoyono's 2004 alliance but which did not join the president's new coalition ahead of the presidential election in July.
However, Bakrie is widely expected to become the new leader of Golkar and could still join Yudhoyono's coalition, and Rizal is seen as one of the conduits between Bakrie and Yudhoyono.
When Bakrie's business empire ran into financial difficulties last year, Rizal dropped his presidential bid.
Choel, the youngest brother, also has a Bakrie connection, as he is president director of a Bakrie-owned news portal. But his main focus in recent months has been Fox Indonesia, a political consultancy which he founded and which played an important role in securing Yudhoyono's win through its use of opinion polls.
Choel's skill, Andi said, is in applying business marketing to the world of politics, with slick TV ads, catchy jingles, and heavy use of polling that showed Yudhoyono as the frontrunner from a very early stage in the campaign.
Fox blundered when the survey company it hired to conduct the polls initially failed to reveal its source of funding, leading some to question the validity of their opinion polls. Ultimately, the forecasts turned out to be fairly accurate.
In the run-up to elections, Choel told Reuters that he wanted to run a Barack Obama-style campaign that would appeal to younger voters by using blogs, Facebook, and Youtube, as well as town hall meetings, modeled on Obama's community gatherings.
These allowed Yudhoyono to mingle with ordinary folk and take questions from the floor. In reality, they were carefully stage-managed. But to many Indonesians, used to presidents who campaigned from the stage, this was a new style of engagement.
"I call it the choreography of a national concerto," Choel said, referring to his work designing political campaigns. "They are in a dark room and they just needed me to come in and turn on the light." (Editing by Sara Webb and Megan Goldin)