Megawati Sukarnoputri

Megawati Sukarnoputri (born 23 January 1947) is an Indonesian politician who served as the fifth President of Indonesia from 23 July 2001 to 20 October 2004, the country's first woman president and, by the Urdu article's count, the sixth woman to lead a Muslim-majority country. ^{1 2}

She is the eldest daughter of Sukarno, who proclaimed Indonesia's independence in 1945, and she has chaired the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) since its founding in 1998. ¹

Her presidency completed the transition begun after Suharto's fall: constitutional amendments under her government introduced a Constitutional Court, the anti-corruption commission KPK, and the first direct presidential elections in Indonesian history. ¹

She was born Diah Permata Megawati Setiawati Sukarnoputri on 23 January 1947 at Yogyakarta, the second child and eldest daughter of Sukarno and his wife Fatmawati. ^{1 3}

Her name "Megawati", from Sanskrit for "cloud goddess", was given by the Indian politician Biju Patnaik at her father's request, while "Sukarnoputri" is a patronymic meaning "daughter of Sukarno" rather than a family name. ^{1 2}

Britannica gives her birthplace as Jakarta; the English, Arabic and Urdu articles and Wikidata all give Yogyakarta, which this record follows, and the variant is recorded. ^{4 5}

She grew up in the Merdeka Palace in Jakarta, dancing for her father's guests and developing a love of gardening. ¹

She was nineteen when her father was forced from power in 1966 and replaced by the government that became Suharto's New Order. ²

She began agriculture at Padjadjaran University and left in 1967, then studied psychology at the University of Indonesia and left after two years; she completed neither degree. ¹

Megawati joined the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) in 1987 and was elected to the People's Representative Council. ¹

In December 1993 she was elected chair of the PDI, but the government refused to recognise her leadership and backed her rival Suryadi, whose position a government-sponsored congress at Medan in June 1996 reimposed. ¹

On 27 July 1996 security forces and Suryadi's supporters attacked the PDI headquarters in Jakarta to evict her loyalists, and the riots that followed made her a symbol of resistance to the New Order. ¹

She backed the United Development Party in the 1997 elections, and after Suharto's fall her faction founded the PDI-P at its October 1998 congress, with her as chair. ¹

The PDI-P won the 1999 legislative elections — 33 per cent of the vote in the English article's figure, 34 per cent in Britannica's — and in November 1998 she had joined fellow reform figures in the Ciganjur Statement. ^{1 4}

When the People's Consultative Assembly voted for a president on 20 October 1999, she lost to Abdurrahman Wahid by 373 votes to 313, and riots by her supporters followed. ¹

The next day the Assembly elected her vice president, by 396 votes to 284 against Hamzah Haz. ¹

In August 2000 Wahid issued a decree handing her responsibility for the day-to-day running of the government, and when the Assembly removed him she was sworn in as president on 23 July 2001. ¹

Her Mutual Assistance Cabinet, announced on 10 August 2001, governed through a term the sources credit with stabilising Indonesia's democratic transition, and the constitutional reforms of her presidency earned her the title the article records: "Mother of Upholding the Constitution". ¹

On 12 October 2002 the Bali bombings killed 202 people, including 88 Australians; her government responded with a counter-terrorism campaign in which the cleric Abu Bakar Ba'asyir was arrested. ¹

In Aceh, the December 2002 ceasefire collapsed and from 19 May 2003 her government imposed martial law and launched an offensive; the article records the human-rights abuses attributed to that campaign. ¹

Her privatisation programme, including the sale of the telecommunications company Indosat, was criticised as neoliberal, and her government ended Indonesia's IMF programme in 2003. ¹

She lost the 2004 presidential runoff to Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono by 61 per cent to 39, and never congratulated him. ¹

Megawati ran again in 2009 with Prabowo Subianto as her running mate and won 26.79 per cent, losing again to Yudhoyono. ¹

She remains chair of the PDI-P through the era of President Joko Widodo, himself a PDI-P member, and the article records periods of tension between them, including over the 2024 elections. ¹

On 22 March 2018 she was appointed head of the steering board of the Pancasila Ideology Development Agency (BPIP), and from 2021 she has held a steering role at the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN). ¹

The positions and judgements in this section are those of the cited sources, reported as theirs; they are not the museum's verdict.

The article records criticism of her presidency's privatisation as neoliberal, of the Aceh campaign's human-rights record, and of her aloof style; it also records the stability-and-constitution assessment summarised above. ¹

No source consulted names a religion or a school for Megawati herself: the English and Urdu articles and Britannica are silent on religion, and Wikidata gives Islam generically. ^{1 4 5}

The Arabic article reports that she speaks of consulting her father's spirit in sleep before difficult decisions, in keeping with Javanese tradition; a reported personal practice and her cultural milieu are not an attestation of a school, and her faith is recorded as unknown in the data. ³

Her first husband, the pilot Surindro Supjarso, whom she married on 1 June 1968, was killed in a plane crash at Biak on 22 January 1970. ¹

In 1972 she married the Egyptian diplomat Hassan Gamal Ahmad Hassan; the marriage was annulled within three months — the Arabic article says they separated the same year. ^{1 3}

On 25 March 1973 she married Taufiq Kiemas, who remained her husband until his death on 8 June 2013, and they had her three children: Mohammad Rizki Pratama, Muhammad Prananda Prabowo and Puan Maharani. ¹

The sources for this record are the English Wikipedia article "Megawati Sukarnoputri" (revision 1380983897), the Arabic Wikipedia article «ميجاواتي سوكارنوبوتري» (revision 76480163), the Urdu Wikipedia article «میگاوتی سوکارنوپتری» (revision 8377932), Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry "Megawati Sukarnoputri" (last updated 2 October 2026), and Wikidata item Q76179, all registered as source entities in the museum's data and checked on 25 October 2026.