SBY's first-year report: It's 7 out of 10

Endy M. Bayuni, Jakarta

How did President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono do in his first year in office? Since we are now in the habit of giving marks for our leaders, at the risk of being jeered, I am giving him a score of 7 out of 10. If six is a passing grade, SBY did more than just passing this year.

Too kind, one might say, considering that most other people are giving him lower or even failing grades. I have my reasons for being kind, or even generous, to him.

Here is a president who went through a lot in his first year, probably much more than he had bargained for, and certainly a lot more than earlier Indonesian presidents have had to deal with. Here is a president, who, in spite of his landslide 62 percent victory at the polls, knows the limits of his office in the new political landscape where power is shared out. Here is a president who shows that he is maturing on the job.

When SBY read the oath of his office 12 months ago, Indonesian politics entered into uncharted territory.

Indonesia's first directly elected president found his powers clipped by the newly amended 1945 Constitution. Now, he has to share power with the House of Representatives, and with a new player in town, the Regional Representatives Council modeled on the U.S. Senate.

Elected members of these two institutions owe their allegiances to the electorate or their political parties, and not so much to the President.

SBY's position became even more tenuous considering that his party machinery, the Democrat Party, only won 7 percent of the parliamentary votes in April 2004.

Enter Jusuf Kalla who got elected as vice president on the same ticket. Kalla is no ordinary vice president as he came in with a lot of his own political capital, including initially a breakaway faction of Golkar, but later on, in December, the full force of the party with the most seats in the House. SBY thus has had to share power, for better or for worse, with a politically powerful vice president.

The political power plays of 12 months ago is reflected in the composition of the United Indonesia Cabinet.

The President then faced the prospect of having to fight his legislative agenda with the powerful coalition of the two largest factions in the House: Golkar which was then still controlled by Akbar Tandjung, and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) of Megawati Soekarnoputri, the losing incumbent in last year's presidential election. He therefore forged a coalition of his own, involving his PD and smaller Islamist parties, not so much as to match the strength of the Nationhood Coalition as to minimize the deficit of the number of votes in the House.

This was the political reality as SBY moved to the presidential palace a year ago. Unlike Soeharto, whose word would immediately become law, SBY knew that he faced a tough fight from many powerful detractors, particularly the opposition factions in the House, which are determined in giving him a run for his money.

Every major decision he made had to go through the scrutiny of the House and stand up to other political forces in the country.

SBY is the captain of the ship all right but, as one foreign observer aptly noted, he faces a continuously mutinous crew.

Critics have called the President indecisive, and were frustrated at his failure to capitalize on the 62 percent support he won at the polls in September 2004. While there may be some of that, it is the limitations of the powers of his office that dictated him to be more cautious in making decisions. Anyone else in his place would have done the same, doing the political maths before making the important decisions.

To complicate matters even further, beginning this year Susilo is losing his clout over the regions. With direct elections for governors and regional chiefs, the elected leaders owe their allegiances to the people first, the political parties that sponsored their election second, and the President a distant third, if at all. We have already seen an example of this lack of loyalty from the regions when the new West Sumatra Governor Gamawan Fauzi decided to throw his support behind the protests against the government's hikes in fuel prices this month.

As if the political challenges facing SBY were not enough, his first year was marked with many unforeseen events that were beyond his control. These took a lot out of the President and his team, at times at the expense of his own agenda, including the fight against corruption, the promotion of governance, and the push for higher economic growth to create more jobs, raise people's income and eradicate poverty.

There was the big earthquake and the devastating tsunami in Aceh in December as well as other smaller natural disasters. There were the outbreaks of polio, thousands of malnourished children, and lately bird flu. In meantime, world oil prices went through the roof during the year and forced him to hike domestic fuel prices twice. And at the start of this month, terrorists struck again.

Overall, SBY did relatively well in dealing with these largely unforeseen problems. He made little inroads into his agenda of fighting corruption and promoting investment, but they did not suffer terribly either.

About the only bright spot in his presidency was the peace agreement that the government signed with the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in August which officially ended a 30-year bloody war.

For sure, there are still many areas of concern that have not been fully addressed. The President's human rights record, for example, is tarnished by his failure to solve the mystery surrounding the murder of human rights campaigner Munir. His approval for the Indonesian Military (TNI) to reactivate its territorial role as part of his war on terror also goes against the spirit eliminating the military's presence in politics.

A score of 7 nevertheless seems reasonable if we take the presidency as a whole, rather than look at specific issues where he failed. It is a reasonable when measured against the big and unforeseen tragedies, and most of all, it is reasonable given the political battles he constantly faced.

A score of 7 also looks reasonable considering the alternative. One shudders to think how Megawati, or the other three president wannabes for that matter, would have dealt with these seemingly endless crises if they were in charge.

Looking ahead, if SBY survives this tumultuous first year in his presidency, and if he had really matured with the job these past 12 months, the coming years will likely be a little more plain sailing.