When traffic in Jakarta snarls to a stop - as it so often does in the Indonesian capital - swarms of peddlers besiege occupants of air-conditioned cars, offering up everything from roasted peanut to balloons. Lately, though, the street vendors have added another item to their eclectic wares: posters of the country's recently re-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The hawking of new merchandise in some of the world's worst gridlock is a fitting metaphor for a country that hopes to add a second I to the so-called BRIC emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Just as SBY's second five-year term will draw to a close in 2014 - by which time he has vowed at least 7% economic growth, up from the 4.5% estimated for this year - urban planners fear that traffic in Jakarta will grind to a halt unless its transportation system is overhauled.

If anyone can keep Indonesia moving, it's the 60-year-old former army general who last month was sworn in for what, by law, is his final term. SBY, as he is commonly known in Indonesia, already made history in 2004 as the country's first directly elected President. In a nation where 14% of the country's 240 million citizens still live under the poverty line, SBY, who has a careful, consensus-driven leadership style, delivered one of the G-20's most impressive economic growth rates this year. His anticorruption drive, which landed even his own son's father-in-law in jail, drew plaudits in a country where graft often feels as omnipresent as urban smog. Little more than a decade after Indonesia emerged from dictatorship, SBY's peaceful re-election is proof that the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation can thrive as a stable democracy.

The question now is what SBY will do with the overwhelming mandate he received from the Indonesian people in July. In his first foreign-media interview since his re-election, the President sounded the note of change: "Bureaucratic reform is one of my top priorities and so is combating corruption. If we achieve this, we can create a conducive climate for our economy to grow and our people to prosper." Dumping a marriage-of-convenience Vice President from his first term, SBY selected respected former central banker Boediono as his No. 2 this time around; despite political pressure, he has kept on Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, whose commitment to cleaning up Indonesia's regulatory morass has delighted foreign investors even as it has irked some of the President's closest advisers, who didn't appreciate their own business interests coming under scrutiny. (In a further cleanup bid, SBY is instituting a pay raise for his Cabinet members "so they are not tempted by corruption.")