Analysts have not been kind to Jusef Habibie on his first day as Indonesia's president.
"Habibie is notoriously unpopular within Indonesia, within the armed forces, within the financial community," said Damien Kingsbury of Monash University's Asia Institute in Melbourne. "He is not well liked within Golkar (the ruling party), and he is publicly loathed."
"It's not the worst-case scenario -- it's probably the second worst. It's moving in the right direction but at a snail's pace," said Graham Neilson, Asian regional economist at Paribas.
Hmm. Maybe the pulsing icons and blinking text on the new president's Web page are rubbing folks the wrong way.
Habibie may not last long at the top, but Indonesia will always be able to claim that for a time it had a very geeky president -- perhaps geekier, even, than the man positioned to lead the United States in 2000. In addition to the bad homepage (with prominent counter, of course), Habibie has a doctorate in engineering, and he worked for 18 years as an aerospace research scientist and executive in Germany.
And according to an Associated Press report, as research and technology minister, he had a fondness for things new. This led him to eschew building industries thought by many investors to be appropriate for a country with a low-cost labor force and instead pursue "a higher vision based on expensive, sophisticated technology." While Habibie failed to come up with anything to rival the "Vision 2000" of Malaysia's Mahathir bin Mohamad, he did set up an aircraft factory.
Unfortunately, it was just the sort of pricey adventure the international community didn't want to see, and the IMF pulled the plug on it when it implemented a reform plan for Indonesia's collapsed economy.
Reuters contributed to the report.
