Word: wahid
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Indonesia is the home of shadow puppetry, and that's how its elites conduct their politics - behind a screen. The fate of President Abdurrahman Wahid appeared to be sealed Thursday when parliament overwhelmingly voted to censure him for involvement in two corruption scandals, opening the way for impeachment proceedings. That left the world's fourth most populous nation poised for a new round of political turmoil, with supporters of rival parties clashing on the streets, the military speaking openly about taking charge if the politicians can't restore order, and the political, military and business elites locking into a fresh...
...killer blow for Wahid came from his vice president, Megawati Sukarnoputri, who leads the largest party in parliament. Although President Wahid announced after a meeting with Megawati Wednesday that he had her support, her party sided with the anti-Wahid majority in parliament Thursday. No surprises there - Megawati won a plurality of votes in the last election and had assumed she was headed for the presidency, only to be denied by Wahid's backroom maneuvering. Although his own Islamic party commands only 10 percent of the seats in parliament, Wahid managed to shut her out with the support...
...took a few canny tricks to win Abdurrahman Wahid the presidency of Indonesia in the first place, but holding onto it now may be beyond even his legendary political skills. At first glance, Wahid's position Tuesday looked remarkably like that of Philippines president Joseph Estrada two weeks ago, just before his ouster in a palace coup: A parliamentary inquiry has concluded that the president was involved in two recent financial scandals, boosting calls both from within the legislature and on Jakarta's rowdy streets for his impeachment...
...Wahid heads up an Islamic party that controls only 10 percent of the seats in parliament, but managed to beat out the center-left populist Megawati Sukarnoputri - who had won a plurality of the votes in the 1999 presidential election - by cobbling together a coalition comprising Suharto's Golkar party and a number of smaller Islamic parties. He then showed a deft political touch by bringing Megawati in as his vice president, to neutralize the danger posed by her supporters on the streets...
...Wahid may have proved a deft manipulator of the complex backroom machinations that pervade Indonesian politics, but in the end he was simply a compromise figure sufficiently acceptable to the nation's political, business and military elites to preside over a temporary equilibrium. Now that the students are back on the streets, the currency and stock market are in the doldrums, the provinces are restive, the military is fidgety and the political sharks have smelled blood, the Wahid equilibrium may have been shattered...