Indonesian politics: The empire strikes back

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

FOR the first time in its history, on October 20th Indonesia will witness the transfer of power from one popularly elected president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, to another, Joko Widodo. Until now, high-level politics has been dominated by a tiny group of people with sometimes interlinked interests—if shifting allegiances. Mr Joko is the first to come from well outside that circle.

The incoming president (above, centre), who is widely known as Jokowi, is the son of a timber collector and was raised in a riverbank shack in the mid-sized Javanese city of Solo. In private or out visiting voters, he is engaging, even charismatic. In set-piece speeches, he is halting, and he hates pomp. Jokowi was elected as a new sort of leader for Indonesia: young(ish), pragmatic, approachable and to all appearances untainted by corruption. Propelled by cohorts of younger, technologically sophisticated voters, he rose to prominence not through party ranks but on a record of constituent service and good governance. As mayor of Solo and then governor of Jakarta, he dealt with the quotidian issues of traffic, flooding and sanitation—the sorts of issues that people care about, though politicians rarely deign to spend time on them.

Jokowi takes power at a time when Indonesia, as a great man once put it, is at a crossroads. During much of Mr Yudhoyono’s decade in office the country boomed, thanks in part to China’s hunger for Indonesian commodities, notably coal, oil, gas and timber. But now growth has slowed, from an annual average of 6.3% in 2010-12 to 5.2% in the first half of this year.

Further, over the next six years Indonesia will add 15m people to its workforce. The World Bank says it should be trying to achieve growth rates of 9%. For that, Indonesia needs much better education, health care and infrastructure. And, with Indonesia already a net importer of oil, fuel subsidies badly need to be cut, for they account for nearly a fifth of the government budget. Jokowi tried to persuade Mr Yudhoyono to take the political flak for him by cutting subsidies on his way out of the presidential office. But there is bad blood between Mr Yudhoyono and Megawati Sukarnoputri, matriarch of the PDI-P party to which Jokowi belongs. The outgoing president refused.

Jokowi knows that cutting subsidies is now a priority in his early days as president. That would be a tough enough challenge for any leader, but for Jokowi things are worse. The man he beat for the presidency is Prabowo Subianto, a former special-forces general with a tainted human-rights record. He is representative of an older order, with connections to the Suharto era, that seems determined to fight back.

That much became clear on September 26th when Indonesia’s parliament, dominated by parties belonging to Mr Prabowo’s “Red-White” coalition, passed a bill scrapping direct elections for 500-odd provincial governorships, regency heads and city mayors. Henceforth, the bill stipulated, such leaders would be chosen by regional councils—most of which happen to be controlled by Red-White-aligned parties, thanks to their well-funded machines. It has escaped nobody’s attention that Jokowi, as a former mayor and governor, is a product of direct elections.

The bill offended many Indonesians for whom the decentralisation of the past 15-odd years is one of their country’s great democratic successes. Some began to take to the streets. Mr Yudhoyono came in for a lot of criticism for not preventing the bill from passing. Legislators from his Democrat Party walked out before the vote, saying they wished to remain “neutral”. Mr Yudhoyono was at the United Nations in New York as the vote took place. Minutes before the vote he got a text message from a legislator asking for instructions. “Sorry,” the president texted back, “I will call you later.”

Mr Yudhoyono soon discovered that when stripping citizens of their right to choose their leaders, “neutral” is an unpopular position. So he declared himself “disappointed” by the vote. On September 30th Mr Yudhoyono defied years of established form by actually doing something. He said he would issue a presidential decree to reverse the new law. Yet even that is less impressive than it sounds: it merely suspends the law until parliament votes on it again.

Parties loyal to Jowoki have only 47% of the seats in the legislature. Yet the president-elect professes to be sanguine about working with a parliamentary minority. He points out that in both Solo and Jakarta he never had a majority in the local assembly but was able to get a lot done—often by appealing over politicians’ heads to ordinary people. On a national level his task will be harder. And he faces not just a hostile national parliament but also “a counter-government at the local level”, as Paul Rowland, a political analyst with Reformasi, a newsletter, puts it.

Some fear that the old establishment’s attempts to reverse the country’s democratic development are only just beginning. The Red-White coalition will probably try again to scrap direct local elections. It might even try to amend the constitution to do away with direct national elections. Mr Prabowo, for one, has repeatedly expressed scepticism about direct elections—indeed, if politicians sitting in parliament rather than voters chose the president, as they used to, he would probably be preparing for his inauguration. The opposition has the numbers to attempt a restoration. To pass the legislature, constitutional changes require a simple majority—an extraordinarily low threshold. However, two-thirds of members must be present, which should help Jokowi.

The issue of local elections provides a clear distinction between the president-elect and his opponents: he favours democracy, and they oppose it. The public, Jokowi said after the vote in September, “can see which parties have taken away people’s political rights”. That is a welcome direct assertion after Mr Yudhoyono’s endless search for consensus during his years in office. That search brought stability, but it also engendered political drift and rampant corruption. The fact that Jokowi is now riling the political system is surely no bad thing.

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