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Indonesia's unlikely - and steady - democracy
Written by Our Correspondent
Thursday, 26 March 2009
As it prepares for elections, the country outshines its neighbors
A decade ago, Indonesia was often written off by analysts as unstable and
perilously close to being dismembered piece by fractious piece in the wake of
the tragedy in East Timor and ethnic and religious tensions throughout the vast
archipelago. But heading into national elections scheduled for April 9, its
democracy seems to be in pretty good shape 11 years after rioting and economic
meltdown forced out former President Suharto, the strongman who ran the country
for 32 years.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the retired general who took power in
national elections in 2004 on an anticorruption ticket, has considerably
solidified his position. In 2004, his Democratic Party was a relatively minor
force that forged an uncomfortable coalition with the Golkar Party and its
chairman, Jusuf Kalla, who became Yudhoyono's vice president. Recent polls
(which can be notoriously unreliable), however, have the Democratic Party with
nearly a quarter of the electorate, if the Indonesian Survey Institute data is
anywhere near accurate.
With nearly 40 parties lined up to vie for hundreds of seats in Regional
Representative Councils or the 560 seats up for grabs in the national House of
Representatives, or DPR, the big question is what happens after the elections,
when the real strength of the major players is determined and serious jockeying
will begin to for the presidential election to be held in July, which will
likely be followed by a runoff.
The game is complicated because under the election laws a party cannot
nominate a presidential candidate unless it wins 20 percent of the seats or 25
percent of the vote in legislative elections - the only party likely to reach
that milestone is the president's Democratic Party. A handful of others -
Golkar, former President Megawati Sukarnoputri's Democratic Party of Struggle,
or PDI-P, the new Gerindra Party of right-wing former Army General Prabowo
Subianto - will be in the running to form coalitions to reach the 20 percent
threshold in order to make a run for the top spot.
And here the Islamists play a potential role, especially the Prosperous
Justice Party, or PKS, which rose in popularity in 2004. While Islamic parties
generally have seen their support shrink by most measures, the complex
electoral arithmetic - and lack of any real issues other than flag waving and
sloganeering - could yet find the PKS in a potential presidential coalition
with either Golkar or the Democrats, both of which bill themselves as
nationalist and secular. That courtship began late last year when the two
parties both backed an unpopular and hard-edged anti-pornography bill pushed by
religious extremists as a way to curry favor with potential Islamist coalition
partners.
Andi Mallarangeng, a spokesman for Yudhoyono, told CNN recently that the
president's support for the bill was a "symbolic gesture" to Islamists. "During
the process of legislation, [the government] made sure we do not support
pornography," Mallarangeng told CNN. "But there should be no limitation on
freedom of arts and expression"
Unfortunately, critics have said the bill undermines traditional culture
by proscribing traditional dances, could eventually ban swimsuits from the
beaches of Bali and may lead to rampant vigilantism. The measure is being put
through the courts by reformers who hope to nullify it.
Still, Indonesia's imperfect democracy is in better odor than most of the
rest of Southeast Asia and there is little fear here that serious mayhem will
come from the polls, despite some worrying signs of fraud in the voter lists in
populous East Java and continuing ethnic tensions in Papua.
Thailand is still suffering the after effects of the 2006 royalist coup
that ousted Thaksin Shinawatra's democratically elected government. The royalty
and political establishment there later annulled elections and supported street
demonstrations in its effort to finally manipulate the system into putting in
place the government it wanted, led now by the Democrat Party.
Malaysia, after a surprising election in March 2008 that broke the
two-thirds majority stranglehold of the national ruling coalition in
parliament, has fallen into both intraparty and ethnic squabbling and appears
set to name Najib Tun Razak as prime minister, despite his involvement in a
long series of scandals, including connections with the spectacular murder of a
beautiful Mongolian woman.
The Philippines is still trying to shake off the hangover of 2001's
People Power II ouster of Joseph Estrada, which was little more than a coup
disguised as a big street demonstration. That event just added fuel to the
idea, as it did in Thailand, that indignant elites do not have to wait for an
elected government to finish out its term.
Elsewhere, Singapore, of course, is Singapore, which maintains a thin
façade of democracy designed to keep the ruling Lee family in power. Laos and
Vietnam are one-party states as, effectively, is Cambodia under Hun Sen. And
Burma's military dictatorship remains one of the world's most reviled
governments.
Contrast them with Indonesia and things look pretty good. With a certain
amount of ambiguity, a new class of politician is coalescing around Yudhoyono.
The old guard that surrounded Suharto, which viewed government as a personal
cash register, is losing momentum although all the major presidential
candidates hail from the old guard. The new government, if Yudhoyono wins, will
probably see a proliferation of the kinds of technocrats like Sri Mulyani
Indrawati, the finance minister, and Mari E Pangestu, the trade minister, with
fewer politicians around the ministries.
Golkar, the political vehicle for Suharto, was still the dominant
political party in 2004, with Kalla largely able to dictate the terms of his
support for Yudhoyono, including putting in place old-guard cabinet members
like Aburizal Bakrie, the head of the Bakrie clan whose troubled empire has
benefited repeatedly from government intervention. Golkar has now fallen to
below the magic 20 percent of voters, according to the Indonesian Survey
Institute poll, and some party insiders worry it could suffer a massive
embarrassment on April 9, a fear that has Kalla increasingly isolated inside
the party.
Megawati's PDI-P has fallen to 17.3 percent, according to the poll. The
Islamic parties may have the lowest aggregate total since Suharto fell, if the
polls are close to accurate. Religious parties got nearly 45 percent of the
vote in Indonesia's first elections in 1955, but they have slowly tailed off,
falling to 38 percent in 2004. Although at one point it was expected that the
country's four Islamic parties would get as little as 17 to 23 percent of the
votes, that figure has been rising in recent days.
The best hope for moderates, say many observers, is for Yudhoyono's party
to get a clear win on April 9.
"The legislative elections will lead to a less fragmented government for
the 2009-2014 term because parties must have 20 percent of the seats or a
coalition of 25 percent of the votes cast to nominate a presidential
candidate," said a knowledgeable western political observer. "That means there
will be far fewer candidates, and a big party like the Democratic Party can
likely get that 20 percent on its own, thus it won't have to going into a
coalition with Golkar or anyone else. He can run with a technocrat vice
presidential candidate or senior Democratic Party official, and if or when he
wins, he doesn't have to hand out any cabinet posts as a payback for the
coalition."
Part of Yudhoyono's success has to be laid to attempts, not always
successful, to clean out corruption. The country's Corruption Eradication
Commission, or KPK, has jailed or indicted at least nine members of the House
of Representatives, as well as a number of other senior government officials
and businessmen. The arrested include members of Golkar, the Democratic Party,
PDI-P and others. The house remains one of the most corrupt institutions in a
country tied with eight other countries for 126th place in Transparency
International's 2008 corruption index of 180 countries.
The economy, which was flattened by the Asian Financial Crisis of
1997-1998, and hammered by the Bali bombings and the Asian tsunami of 2004,
which claimed an estimated 170,000 lives in Indonesia alone, is still in
positive territory despite the current global crisis. Partly because its
domestic economy largely shields it from export slumps, Indonesia, along with
the Philippines, is expected to chug along at 4.0 percent gross domestic
product growth this year, while Singapore's GDP is expected to sink by nearly 5
percent. Thailand, at least partly due to political turmoil, could shrink by as
much as 1.5 percent, and Malaysia's export-dependent economy is expected to
contract by at least 1.2 percent or more. That gives Indonesians a certain
sense of security. The malls remain packed; tourism is set for a moderate
increase.
Against Yudhoyono, Megawati, a listless campaigner and a lackluster
former president but one whose father's name - Sukarno, the founder of the
country - still inspires affection, remains the front runner. Others include
Prabowo, the former head of the Army Strategic Reserve unit Kostrad and a
one-time Suharto son-in-law. Prabowo was dismissed from Kostrad for mobilizing
troops around Jakarta without orders following Suharto's resignation, prompting
speculation he was orchestrating a coup. He's also been implicated in the
kidnappings and torture of student activists prior to Suharto's fall, and of
instigating anti-Chinese riots in 1998, charges he denies. He was never
convicted of anything, however, and his well-funded Gerindra party is
blanketing the country with newspaper and television advertising. Jusuf Kalla,
the Golkar head, is making a nominal run for the top job, but he is given
little chance because he is an ethnic Buginese from South Sulawesi in a
political scene dominated by Javanese.
Is there a wild card? If the Democratic Party falls short, the fear that
it will sell its soul to the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS, is
real. The PKS has built its support on attempts to bring Islamic purity to
Indonesia's pluralistic society and vows to clean up corruption.
In 2004, the party endorsed Yudhoyono for the presidency and has largely
run rings around the other Islamic parties with a mixture of savvy public
relations and connections to the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood. It was
considered to be the driving force behind the anti-pornography bill that
Yudhoyono signed. Secularists worry that despite its relatively small size, it
will end up as a kingmaker and the price of its support will be hegemony over
the social agencies that supposedly govern public morals. But relatively few
Indonesians, even among the 90 percent of the country that is at least
nominally Muslim, want the hard-line Imams to tell them what to do. It remains
to be seen what damage they might do.
It's a long shot and moderates of all stripes say it is unlikely.
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