09:21
Tieng Anh Vui
THE world’s third-largest democracy went to the polls on April 9th in parliamentary and local elections. A public holiday was declared to encourage 190m-odd people to cast their votes at 545,000 polling stations for over 235,000 candidates contesting 20,000 or so elected posts. The official results of this monumental exercise will not be known until early next month. But based on past experience, exit polls published the same afternoon have probably given a fairly accurate picture of the outcome.
While much went as predicted, the big surprise was the relatively poor showing of the main opposition party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P. It was widely expected to get a significant boost from the popularity of its recently declared presidential candidate, Joko Widodo, widely known as Jokowi, the governor of the capital, Jakarta. Party managers were hoping the PDI-P would get 25-30% of the popular vote, but the exit polls suggest it will have to settle for 19%.
The result will undoubtedly make life more difficult for Jokowi in the presidential election on July 9th. Under Indonesia’s complex electoral rules, a party needs at least 25% of the popular vote in these parliamentary elections—or 20% of the seats—to be able to nominate its own candidate for the presidential race. Thus the PDI-P appears already to have fallen well short of the popular threshold, and may also fall short in parliamentary seats. If so, it will have to enter into a coalition with one or more parties.
Such is Jokowi’s extraordinary popularity that his own candidacy seems assured. And the PDI-P might anyway have formed some sort of coalition even had it done astoundingly well on April 9th. But the PDI-P’s underwhelming performance gives Jokowi and the party leader, Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of the country’s founding president and a former president herself, a weaker hand when it comes to picking the vice-presidential candidate and other senior posts in a new government. Ms Megawati was obliged to choose Jokowi as the party’s presidential candidate because of his obvious popularity, despite presidential ambitions of her own. Now both will have to fight a bit harder for the government that they want.
The other main parties, all broadly secular and nationalist, trailed not far behind the PDI-P. Golkar, the political vehicle of the late Suharto and now led by an oligarch and presidential hopeful, Aburizal Bakrie, won about 12% of the vote, while Gerindra, headed by a former special-forces commander, Prabowo Subianto, won about 11.5%. The big loser was the Democrat Party of the outgoing president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Having won 21% of the vote at the last election in 2009, its share dropped to just 9%, a poor fourth.
Voters were punishing the Democrats for a series of high-profile corruption cases involving the party’s senior officials. But the showing also reflects a feeling of disillusion with the two-term president, who promised much but failed to deal with rampant corruption, lousy infrastructure and much else. The fate of the Democrat Party in the parliamentary polls is a warning to the next president of what voters now expect of him, whether or not it turns out to be Jokowi.
Some of the smaller Islamic parties in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation did better than expected. Now even more parties will sit in parliament than before, making it still more fractious. Some parties will look to flex their new muscle, compounding the challenges facing any government trying to force modernising measures through the legislature. Added to Jokowi’s new need for coalition partners, the complex business of governing this highly decentralised, untidy and combative democracy has probably just got that much harder.
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