A former senior general during the Suharto dictatorship, the taciturn 60-year-old has become a standard-bearer for Indonesia's haphazard reform push since the strongman's fall in 1998.

Rising to power in the country's first direct presidential election in 2004, Yudhoyono is credited with years of relative stability and prosperity that he turned into a thumping re-election victory in July.

The nationwide poll saw Yudhoyono win 60.8 percent of the vote, compared to 26.8 percent for ex-president Megawati Sukarnoputri and 12.4 percent for outgoing Vice President Jusuf Kalla.

A Muslim from the country's dominant Javanese ethnic group, Yudhoyono's first term was characterised by a rare sense of normality in the unwieldy Muslim-majority nation of 234 million people.

Known as SBY, he rarely gives media interviews and has an aloof, non-confrontational style that critics say comes across as indecisive.

The only apparent brightness to his persona is a well-publicised sentimentality and a love of music.

He has released a number of albums of his own love songs, the latest being a collection of ballads entitled "My Longing for You". He also famously cried during a screening of romantic movie "Ayat-Ayat Cinta" (Verses of Love).

On entering office, he took the reins of one of the world's most corrupt countries, weighed down by widespread poverty, separatist insurgencies in Aceh and Papua, and sporadic suicide attacks by the Islamist Jemaah Islamiyah movement and its allies.

His problems were soon compounded by the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed more than 168,000 people in Sumatra's Aceh province.

There have been a string of natural disasters since, including an earthquake in late September that killed more than 1,000 people on Sumatra island.

Some superstitious Indonesians have taken to seeing dark portents in his initials -- claiming that SBY stands for "Selalu Bencana Ya", roughly meaning "Always A Disaster".

But Yudhoyono starts his second term having made progress on most fronts.

Reconstruction in Aceh has been hailed a success and peace has held in the province after a 2005 foreign-brokered peace deal with separatist rebels.

Islamist militancy is widely seen as a diminished threat, despite July 17 double suicide bombings that killed seven people at Jakarta hotels, with strings of arrests and the killing of top militants.

Battles have also been won in the war against corruption, although graft remains deeply rooted.

Despite his sky-high popularity, opponents have tried to paint Yudhoyono as a "neo-liberal" who has put the interests of foreign capitalists over poor workers and farmers.

The president's appointment of former central bank governor Boediono as his second-term vice president has helped fuel these attacks.

Boediono, 66, has little political clout of his own but is seen as boosting Yudhoyono's emphasis on cool-headed, responsible governance over populism.

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