Indonesia’s elections: Democracy’s big bang

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

AS ORGANISED human efforts go, it is a big one. Nearly 190m Indonesians out of a population of about 250m are eligible to go to the polls on April 9th to elect a new parliament. The election commission has printed 775m ballot papers and shipped them to 550,000 polling stations scattered across the sprawling archipelago’s 900-odd settled islands. It is the fourth election since protesters, led by students, ousted Suharto, Indonesia’s long-ruling dictator, in 1998.

At stake are 560 seats in the House of Representatives or DPR, the lower house, along with 132 seats in the upper house. In addition, under Indonesia’s highly decentralised system of government since Suharto, voters will be electing 2,112 assemblymen in 33 provinces and almost 17,000 legislators at the district level. But in truth, for all the gargantuan nature of the undertaking, all eyes will be on just one result: how well the main opposition party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), does in parliament.

For it is the parliamentary polls that decide who may be nominated in the presidential election to be held on July 9th. Last month the PDI-P’s matriarchal head, Megawati Sukarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia’s first president and herself president over a decade ago, stood aside, anointing the capital’s popular governor, Joko Widodo, as her party’s chosen candidate for president.

According to all the opinion polls, Jokowi, as he is widely known, has a seemingly unassailable lead over all the other likely candidates to succeed Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who is coming to the end of his second and final term. But before it may enter Jokowi in the presidential race, the PDI-P must secure 25% of the popular vote in the legislative elections, or 20% of the seats in the DPR. Should the party fail to reach the nominating thresholds, it will have to strike an alliance with at least one other party, and perhaps give up the chance to choose Jokowi’s running-mate for vice-president.

Such coalitions are commonplace in Indonesian politics, but the PDI-P hopes that Jokowi’s popularity will help push the party over the thresholds. According to an opinion poll published this month by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Jakarta think-tank, 20.1% of those surveyed would put their mark beside the PDI-P’s fiery-eyed buffalo. Suharto’s old party, Golkar, had the support of 15.8% of respondents, while 11.3% say they would vote for Gerindra, led by a former special-forces general, Prabowo Subianto.

Mr Yudhoyono’s own Democrat Party is likely to be the biggest loser on April 9th. It won 21% of the vote at the 2009 election but now enjoys only single-digit support. This reflects widespread disenchantment with the corruption scandals and the drift in Mr Yudhoyono’s government.

There have been moments of colour during the campaigning. At a military-themed spectacle inside Jakarta’s main stadium, Mr Prabowo rode on a bay steed and blustered against those who would sell the country to foreigners. In eastern Java, at a rally organised by a small Islamic party, a hip-swinging performance by a 67-year-old crooner of dangdut songs, Rhoma Irama, reportedly caused 14 women to swoon. Many parties have enlisted the support of soap-opera stars, swimsuit models and similar attractions to tickle voters’ interest.

Behind the razzmatazz of the election, a bit more is at stake than how well Jokowi’s party fares. The lower house is not the rubber-stamp institution it was under Suharto. Indonesia’s next president will have to work with it, not least to pass a $160 billion-odd budget. And lately it has got pushier, says Douglas Ramage of Bower Group Asia, a consulting firm. In February it passed a law giving itself power to veto trade treaties, for example. It often gets its way over the executive, most recently in relation to mineral exports.

Whatever the outcome on April 9th, Indonesia’s parliamentary parties are not going to propose wildly different policies on tax, welfare or indeed any of the issues that define parties in Western democracies. In Indonesia they command a broad cross-party consensus. Some observers see the parties merely as political vehicles for individual politicians and their families, but Marcus Mietzner of the Australian National University points to parties’ distinctive cultural and political identities. Indonesia is the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, and as soon as parliamentary debates touch on things like sharia law or religious minorities party differences start to count.

This year will be the last in which the parliamentary and presidential elections are held on different days. Indonesia’s constitutional court has ruled that holding the presidential election three months after the parliamentary one encourages horse-trading in ways that undermine the checks and balances of democracy. It decided that both elections should be held on the same day, though not until 2019. That will be an even bigger bang.

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