Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (born September 9, 1949, Pacitan, East Java, Indonesia) is an Indonesian military officer, politician, and government official who was the first popularly elected president of Indonesia (2004–14).

Yudhoyono was born into a well-to-do family of aristocratic background. Following in the footsteps of his father, a middle-ranking officer, he entered the army after graduating from the Indonesian Military Academy in 1973. His quick rise through the ranks was assisted by his marriage to Kristiani Herawati, the daughter of a powerful general. As an officer, Yudhoyono acquired valuable experience abroad, undertaking the United States Army’s Infantry Officer Advanced Course in the early 1980s and training at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1991. He also earned a master’s degree in business administration from Webster University near St. Louis, Missouri, in 1991. Yudhoyono eventually earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Bogor Agricultural University in Indonesia in 2004.

In 1995 Yudhoyono served as Indonesia’s chief military observer on the UN peacekeeping force in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Later he was chief of the army’s social and political affairs staff. Yudhoyono left active military service in 2000 with the rank of lieutenant general. From 2000 to 2004 he held high-profile cabinet posts in the governments of both Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri. In 2002 he became the principal founder of the Democrat Party (Partai Demokrat; PD), which became his political vehicle for the rest of his career in public service.

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In 2004, after the PD had contested parliamentary elections in March and won 7.5 percent of the vote, Yudhoyono was able to challenge Megawati for the presidency. He received the largest number of votes in the first round of balloting in July, and in a September runoff election Yudhoyono won a landslide victory over Megawati, garnering 61 percent of the vote. He was sworn in as president on October 20.

Yudhoyono, who was widely seen as possessing the personal traits and professional skills necessary to restore prosperity and stability to the country, entered office with an ambitious reform agenda. He promised to accelerate economic growth, crack down on corruption and terrorism, and strengthen democracy and human rights. Yudhoyono’s government faced an early challenge in December 2004 when a tsunami struck Indonesia; the greatest natural disaster to befall Indonesia in more than a century, it was believed to have killed some 132,000 people. Despite that tragedy, Yudhoyono was able to bring significant improvement to the country’s economy, and his anticorruption campaign drew praise as some 300 national and regional political leaders and officials were tried and found guilty of corruption. Presidential elections were held again in July 2009, and Yudhoyono won a second term in office, this time defeating opponent Megawati in the first round with the same 61 percent of the vote as in 2004.

Yudhoyono’s government had to face more national calamities early in his second term, including powerful earthquakes in 2009 and another major tsunami and the eruption of Mount Merapi in 2010—each of which killed hundreds of people. Indonesia nonetheless was generally prosperous and peaceful for most of the term, though by 2013 economic growth had slowed and inflation was rising. His administration and the PD were dogged by corruption scandals, however, and the party did badly in the 2014 legislative elections. Yudhoyono was unable to run again for president, because of term limits, and he left office in October 2014, succeeded by Joko Widodo (Jokowi). In 2015 he became leader of the PD, and he served until 2020, when his son Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono assumed the post.