Even seasoned Indonesia-watchers have been pinching themselves this year.
The country has gone through a changing of the political guard on a scale unlikely to be witnessed for another generation, in a peaceful manner via three nationwide elections.
That sentence barely does justice to the momentous events that have taken place over the last 12 months in Indonesia, a nation where regime change is usually accompanied by street protests at best and mass slaughter at worst.
Not only did more than 100 millions Indonesians vote three times this year - once for national and local legislatures, and two rounds of the presidential election - they ended the careers of the cabal of leaders who emerged out of the wreckage of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998.
Gone from the stage, or at least the first few rows, are the president, Megawati Sukarnoputri; the vice-president, Hamzah Haz; the speaker of parliament, Akbar Tandjung; the speaker of the supreme assembly, Amien Rais; and 70 per cent of the MPs.
The latter, significantly, include all the members of the military and the police, who now hold no formal political power for the first time in decades.