Having generated a groundswell of popular backing, she nearly dropped the ball last year, failing to come out in support of the student-led movement to topple Suharto. Traumatized by the kidnapping a month earlier of Haryanto Taslam, one of her advisers, she retreated into solitude, unprepared for a leadership role in such a rapidly changing and physically threatening situation. Haryanto was released weeks later. But at the height of demonstrations in May 1998, a television crew ambushed her in a mall: she was forced to concede, sheepishly, that she was "just going shopping." Only as the election campaign got under way this year and people sought an alternative to the electoral muscle of Suharto's Golkar did she regain momentum as the people's choice.

Despite aligning herself with the suffering of the little people, Megawati is certainly not one of them. Born Jan. 23, 1947 in Jogjakarta to Sukarno's second wife, Fatmawati, she was brought to the presidential palace in Jakarta two years later and spent her childhood and teenage years cocooned in First Family privilege. "We called the compound the 'palace village,'" she recalls. "All the drivers and gardeners lived there, and I played with their children. It didn't seem anything special."

But it was the palace, it was special and Megawati got used to life there. She stayed behind with her nanny even when Sukarno took his third wife, Hartini, and Fatmawati left. Charming if unpredictable, Sukarno was adored by his children. "We had our father all to ourselves during breakfast and lunch every day," says Guruh Sukarnoputra, Megawati's youngest brother. "At those precious times, he would ask each of us to tell him about our day at school." Sukarno discussed "more serious things" with Megawati and her elder brother Guntur, "as he thought they were old enough to understand." Sukarno called her "Gadis" (girl) and brought her along on overseas trips. Her aide Subagio remembers a meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade, at which the 14-year-old Megawati was complaining loudly that Vienna's Blue Danube was in fact a "very dark brown."

When Suharto toppled Sukarno, life became difficult for all of his eight children. They were socially ostracized, and Megawati was forced to leave Bandung's Pajajaran University before finishing her agricultural science degree. Ill fortune continued: when she was pregnant with her second son, her husband Surendro, an air force pilot, disappeared in action in Biak, Irian Jaya. His body was never recovered, and even today Megawati gets misty-eyed when she talks of him. She then eloped with an Egyptian businessman, Hassan Gamal Ahmad Hassan, but the marriage lasted only a few months. She now lives in a modest south Jakarta house with her third husband, Taufik Kiemas, who runs a chain of gas stations.

Free of any taint of corruption, Megawati lives a simple life, in sharp contrast to the flamboyance of Suharto's family. A recent dinner with her advisers consisted of fried rice followed by ice cream, hardly haute cuisine. In private she is gracious but distant, speaking slowly in neutral tones with little inflection. "She is gentle and motherly. She loves plants and animals," says her former nanny Eyang Citro, 75. That affection extends to her infamous black mongrel Bentol, who snarls at visitors and has bitten at least one journalist on the hand.

On the campaign trail before the June 7 vote, Megawati showed little emotion and faltered at the political art of self-projection. When getting off a helicopter or plane, instead of waving confidently to the crowd, she would invariably look down at her feet, or at the stairs she was about to descend. The crowds would go wild anyway. In between her short appearances--she rarely spoke for more than 10 minutes--she would nap on the plane, or read a little. Her aides did not bother her with frequent briefings or poll updates; they were transporting an icon for the crowds to admire, not a policy vehicle for people to take issue with. She campaigned as if she already had the mandate to lead.

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