Joko Widodo (L), challenger to the Jakarta governor position and current mayor of Solo city in the Central Java province, walks beside former Indonesian President Megawati Soekarnoputri (C) and People's Consultative Assembly Chairman Taufik Kiemas (R).

Outsider ... the surprise winner of the governorship of Jakarta, Joko Widodo, left, with the former president Megawati Sukarnoputri and other supporters. Photo: Reuters

There comes a point in the curve of political authority for a limited-term leader where it turns inexorably downwards and he or she becomes more and more of a lame duck.

Indonesia's national language has no direct translation of that term, although the country's traditional statecraft was obsessed with the appearance and disappearance of ''wahyu'', the mystical right to rule.

The President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, or SBY, as he is widely known, is now well into the second-last year of the second of the two five-year terms allowed under the constitution.

Lieutenant-General Prabowo Subianto (L) poses with Major-General Muchdi Purwopranjono.

''Think Putin'' … Prabowo Subianto, left, hands over leadership of Indonesia's special forces in 1998. Prabowo is looming ever larger as a prospective winner of Indonesia's 2014 presidential election. Photo: Reuters

His leadership curve may have turned decisively downwards on September 20, when the candidate put up for governor of the capital, Jakarta, by his own political party and its allies lost.

That day, the results of a second round of direct elections for the Jakarta governorship resulted in defeat for incumbent governor Fauzi Bowo, who had been nominated by SBY's Democratic Party, the former Suharto regime official party, Golkar, and two Islamic-oriented parties that together dominate Jakarta's city assembly.

The victor was an outsider, Joko Widodo, or ''Jokowi'', who for the past seven years has been a widely acclaimed mayor of the ancient royal city of Solo, in Central Java, where he controlled the inroads of developers to preserve its cultural heritage and liveability.

At 51, Jokowi and his running mate, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, represented freshness and a break with prevailing venal and communal politics for Jakarta's 8.5 million people. By contrast, Fauzi Bowo was associated with sleazy, ineffective governance under which the city's notorious traffic jams and floods only got worse.

The election got dirty, Bowo's supporters making much of Purnama's Chinese ethnicity (despite his grandiose Javanese name, he is generally known as ''Ahok'') and Christian religion. It didn't work.

''One of the most important lessons that can be taken from this election is that commonsense can triumph over dirty politics,'' said academic Sudirman Nasir in The Jakarta Post.

Yet look behind the Jokowi-Ahok win, and the wider picture is not so benign. The pair were put up by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), led by the former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, and the Great Indonesia Movement Party, or Gerindra, led by Prabowo Subianto, the former Kopassus special forces chief and former son-in-law of Suharto.

Within hours of the Jakarta result, a billboard went up at the city's central Harmoni intersection showing Prabowo's portrait and the words: ''Initiator of Jakarta's Transformation.''

Prabowo is looming ever larger as a prospective winner in the 2014 presidential election. According to the Asia Foundation's Sandra Hamid and other analysts, he has the backing of Megawati and her Sukarnoist party, thanks to a quid pro quo for supporting her failed re-election bid in 2009. He has a billionaire brother, Hashim Djojohadikusomo, to pay for his campaigns.

Now he has a cleanskin stalking horse, and perhaps a future running mate, in Jokowi and Ahok to help wash away the stain of an appalling human rights record as a field commander in East Timor and in trying to suppress the protests that brought Suharto down by ''disappearing'' student leaders and sparking riots against Chinese-Indonesians.

Prabowo as Indonesia's president? ''Think Putin. Think Thaksin,'' says David Bourchier, an Indonesia specialist at the University of Western Australia.

The return of an authoritarian president would be a setback for Indonesia's relations with the rest of the world, Bourchier told an Australian National University update last week, not least because the former Kopassus chief would be Indonesia's first leader on Washington's persona non grata list as it stands.

That Prabowo can return to political circulation in Jakarta shows a sad promiscuity in the country's party ideologies and affiliations, Hamid told the forum. ''Everyone has been in coalition with everyone else,'' she said.

Opinion polls showing Prabowo gaining wide popularity may turn out to be a little engineered, and the Jokowi-Ahok team may pull clear of its sponsors. Even so, the strongest alternative contender for the presidency is Aburizal Bakrie, the businessman at the head of Golkar regarded as an emblem of entrenched cronyism.

One thing that would help would be more thinking and action by SBY to shore up the legacy he leaves Indonesia in 2014, rather than constant tactical positioning. Since he shed liberal economist Sri Mulyani Indrawati from the key finance ministry in mid-2010, economic management has regressed into state interventionism.

Restrictions on live cattle and beef imports have led to high inflation in food prices, and stiff foreign equity divestment and local processing requirements for mining projects threaten resource earnings. The ambit of the State Logistics Body (Bulog) has been extended to stabilising more food commodity prices (at the risk of more waste and corruption).

Meanwhile, the central government spends 24 per cent of its budget on fuel subsidies - more than $30 billion mostly ''poured into the petrol tanks of the rich'', says Neil McCulloch, an economist with AusAID - making SBY's ambition to be remembered as a ''green'' president look hollow.

On the political side, the SBY era has so far left some instruments of a reassertion of military independence from civilian control there for a future autocrat to use.

The ''territorial'' domestic monitoring function, the armed forces have largely ignored a law requiring them to divest businesses, and Papua remains closed off from independent scrutiny of army and police action against a renewed independence movement.

It's not as if Indonesia is decisively pulling clear of the Suharto era. ''Maybe democratic groups should not take existing freedoms for granted,'' Bourchier said, ''and start thinking about how to defend those gains that have been made.''

SBY should join in.