IF APPEARANCES bear any relation to reality in Indonesia, Vice-President Megawati Sukarnoputri will soon be president and able to choose her own cabinet - the country's fourth in less than two years.
Despite frequent attempts, President Abdurrahman Wahid has been unable to shore up his shaky position by imposing emergency rule, or to deflect a parliament which has already twice censured him over alleged corruption and incompetence and could vote to impeach him as early as August.
If Mr Wahid is removed from office, Ms Megawati will succeed him, and who she chooses as her ministers will be crucial to securing her own political survival and repairing relations with the country's international donor community. Her friends say she will make sensible choices, although intellectuals have yet to be convinced she has the cerebral stamina to rise above an indulged upbringing.
'Who does she listen to? She listens to her father,' said Mochtar Buchori, an older member of Ms Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). But her father Sukarno, the country's first president, has been dead since June 21, 1970, and is buried in the family plot at Blitar.
So Ms Megawati has a habit of paying her respects at her father's grave whenever political life in Jakarta becomes too intense. She flew to Blitar on a recent Sunday (May 27) and reportedly drew strength from her unscheduled visit.
'This is why I consider her to be a less suitable candidate for president,' said Mr Buchori. 'It's a very difficult job. Who has the characteristics for the job? Not Mega[wati] but there's nobody else.
'People are tired of the leadership of this country, we are very tired. We long for a leader who is really dedicated to the people, someone like [first president] Sukarno, who could meet the West at the same level with no sense of inferiority, who could be nationalistic without hatred, who had dignity even under threat of death.