A former senior general during the Suharto dictatorship, the taciturn 59-year-old has become a standard-bearer for Indonesia's haphazard reform push since the strongman's fall in 1998.

Yudhoyono won the country's first direct presidential election in 2004 in a landslide victory over then-president Megawati Sukarnoputri, for whom he worked as security minister before the pair fell out.

A Muslim from the country's dominant Javanese ethnic group, Yudhoyono is a clear favourite to win the election after four-and-a-half years of relative stability 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 often comes across as plain boring.

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.

His problems were soon compounded by the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed more than 168,000 people in Aceh and Nias.

But Yudhoyono finishes his term having made progress on most of these problems.

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.

Jemaah Islamiyah is widely seen as being on the back foot after a string of arrests. Dents have also been made in the country's systemic corruption, although graft remains deeply rooted.

But Yudhoyono has been criticised for indecisiveness and blinking under pressure from Islamic hardliners.

His Democratic Party also recently supported a controversial anti-pornography bill opposed by religious minorities and liberals.

Despite his sky-high popularity, opponents have attempted 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 running mate has helped fuel these attacks.

A former economy minister, strait-laced Boediono, 66, has little political clout of his own but is seen as boosting the Yudhoyono campaign's emphasis on cool-headed management over populism and dazzle.

This combined reputation for steady blandness is a key distinction in a field where all three would-be presidential pairs contain a former senior general of the Suharto regime.

Of the three generals, Yudhoyono is the only one not being pursued by activists for rights abuses such as kidnappings, murders and death squads.

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