JAKARTA In May last year the powerful political elite in the Indonesian capital started saying Abdurrahman Wahid might have been the wrong choice to lead them into a new democratic post-Suharto era, AFP reported. That was after only six months in office when the clinically-blind moderate Muslim teacher -- popularly known as "Gus Dur" -- was hauled on the carpet for a parliamentary dressing-down. Then Wahid had almost as many pluses in his pocket as minuses, including taming the military and initiating peace talks with separatist rebels. And he had friends. But by late Thursday, Wahid was isolated. And the same elite, spearheaded by a muscle-flexing Parliament reveling in shedding its Suharto-era rubber stamp role, found the ammunition to threaten him with impeachment after serving only 15 months of his five-year term of office. The Parliament censured Wahid over two financial scandals -- giving him four months to mend his ways or face impeachment by the same body that elected him, the People's Consultative Assembly. On Friday Wahid apologized to the people "for the inconvenience created during the current process of political education and the events at the Parliament." But he refused to heed the mounting calls to resign -- a step which may only increase his isolation. Aside from his opponents' own glaring political ambitions, the reasons for his isolation are not hard to pinpoint -- his erratic comments, his incessant globe-trotting, and the fact that he never had a strong party backing him anyway. But the key to Thursday's censure -- and to both Wahid's political isolation and his survival -- analysts believe, lies with his possible successor, Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri. Megawati's party, the Indonesian Democracy Party for Struggle (PDIP), led the factions in the Parliament in accepting a report that found Wahid implicated in two financial scandals. Said key PDIP Parliamentarian Dimiyati Hartono after the censure: "It is only a warning." The daughter of the country's founding president Sukarno, Megawati swallowed her pride in October 1999, when despite her party's election win, the Upper House of Parliament handed the presidency to Wahid. Lacking any backers outside her own party, she tearfully agreed to accept the vice presidency. But political observers say the relationship has been an increasingly troubled one. Last year, after his dressing down, Wahid appeased Parliament by handing the day-to-day governance of the country to Megawati. Whether she will hold even more power now, remains unclear, but what is obvious is that it is Wahid, not Megawati, who is isolated now. Wahid's bold moves at the outset of his presidency to bring Suharto to trial, ease tensions between Muslims and Christians, and take on corruption in the Central Bank, have all foundered. Adding insult to injury, Suharto's youngest son, convicted of corruption in November, is still dodging happily around the country with the police unable to catch him. Wahid's efforts to talk peace with separatist rebels in Aceh and Irian Jaya provinces have fallen flat, and a bloody Muslim-Christian war rages unabated in the Maluku islands. The military, who voted against him in Parliament on Thursday, are now seen as warming to Megawati, a conservative nationalist. In the words of Emil Salim, a former reformist presidential advisor, the politicians who chose Wahid, have moved against him. Others see darker motives, such as military concerns that Wahid's proposal to lift a Suharto-era ban on communism would open their own history and legitimacy up to question. From a widely-respected prominent Muslim family in Jombang, East Java, Gus Dur was an academic before becoming the leader of Indonesia's largest Muslim grass-roots organization, the 40-million-strong Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in 1984. A political survivor, he made it through 14 years under the iron-fisted Suharto rule by balancing vocal criticism of the regime with praise and the prospect of NU support. Gus Dur married his wife, Nuriyah, in absentia while studying in Baghdad in 1968, and has four daughters.