A Crowd Pleaser; Six years after the political reign of Suharto came to a tumultuous end, Indonesians are once again looking for a strong leader to take their country's reins.

Byline: Joe Cochrane, With Peter Janssen in Jakarta

Indonesian military leaders aren't known for their fan bases. But the baby-faced Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is turning out to be an exception. Last week 15,000 people flocked to a football stadium in the northeast city of Manado to catch a glimpse of the retired four-star Army general and the country's newest political phenomenon. Three weeks ahead of the country's first direct presidential election, Yudhoyono is enjoying a commanding lead--and a rock star's popularity. Recent opinion polls show him with nearly 50 percent of the vote among decided voters, with his opponents, President Megawati Sukarnoputri and former armed-forces chief Wiranto, at about 15 percent each. The 54-year-old presidential candidate--fondly known as "SBY"--has electrified supporters on the campaign trail with the promise of strong leadership mixed with unwavering support for democracy and human rights. "Together, the whole country will change to be a better Indonesia--more peaceful, more secure, more prosperous, more democratic!" he told the cheering crowd last week. "One for all and all for one!"

Six years of a chaotic and sometimes violent democratic transition, following the ouster of strongman ruler Suharto in 1998, has many Indonesians longing for the good old days of stable, authoritarian rule--minus the economic plunder and human-rights abuses. Indeed, a recent survey shows that 47 percent of the public wants the armed forces, which were all but stripped of their formal political role four years ago, to once again take center stage.

If anything explains Yudhoyono's incredible popularity, it is probably the deft way he has positioned himself as the solid middle-ground choice between the old authoritarian and new democratic Indonesia, at a time when the country needs a little bit of both. "If we practice only on the democratization side," he told NEWSWEEK, "and we neglect to maintain our stability and public security, then we may encounter what we've had in the past: an unstable situation." Voters have been enthralled by Yudhoyono's carefully cultivated image of strength, but even more so by his humble, self-effacing manner. "They need a firm hand, but they need a father figure," says James Filgo, a retired U. S. Army officer who ran a military-training program in the United States that Yudhoyono and other rising Indonesian officers attended. "He's refreshing, and best of all he's not tainted."

A career military man, Yudhoyono is one of the few senior officers not to have been directly implicated in the atrocities and human-rights abuses blamed on the Indonesian military. (In 1996, he was chief of staff of the Jakarta military command when military-backed mobs attacked the headquarters of the opposition Indonesian Democratic Party, killing five people and leaving at least 23 others missing. Nevertheless, he was not named on a suspect list released by military police two years ago that included several high-ranking officers.) Born into a military family in East Java in 1949, he joined the Army out of high school and shot through the ranks. His reputation as a professional soldier with an appreciation for human rights landed him a job as chief military observer with the U.N. peacekeeping force in Bosnia in 1995. Three years later, when pro-democracy demonstrations forced Suharto to step down, Yudhoyono, then the chief of military territorial affairs, is believed to have persuaded hard-line generals not to launch a Tiananmen-style crackdown.

Indonesians became more familiar with him as Megawati's security minister. In recent years the country experienced a steady stream of crises, from terrorist attacks by Islamic militants to a resurgent separatist movement in far-flung Aceh province. But Megawati, the daughter of Indonesia's flamboyant founding father, Sukarno, made few public statements about the violence. Almost by default, Yudhoyono became the face of Indonesia, reassuring a nervous public with his apparent resolve. "Everyone wants the strong hand," says one Jakarta-based political observer. "He's a moderate, reform-minded general who steadied a sinking ship."

But when Yudhoyono had a falling-out with Megawati in March, he became an ...