Never Mind Principles: I want to be President!

Politics is back. The eye is still on the big prize, but political campaigning of a sort is underway. After the Prosperous Justice Party grabbed some of the limelight with a TV ad portraying ex-president Suharto as a national hero, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle has joined the fray. It has been running ads in the papers promising cheap groceries for those little people it purports to support. The idea is of course to ensure that ex-president Megawati Sukarnoputri gets another go at the job. Never mind that in her previous term in office, she conspicuously failed to do anything for the little people (staying silent when Indonesian workers were expelled from Malaysia and only reluctantly visiting Bali after the 2002 bomb killed 38 Indonesians in the province that is home to her most loyal supporters). One of her most shameless acts was to help ensure retired general Sutiyoso won a second term as Jakarta governor despite the fact he was military commander of Jakarta in 1996 when troops stormed the offices of Megawati's breakaway wing of her party, killing many of her devoted followers. Then, according to one story, after her defeat she tried to sabotage the state budget by removing subsidies FOR THE POOR to make things difficult for her successor, but was talked out of it.

And now she may be up to her old opportunist tricks again. Rumors abound that she is considering retired general Subianto Prabowo as her running mate, despite the fact he was commander of the Kopassus "special forces" troops allegedly involved in the disappearances of pro-democracy activists (including her supporters!) in the last days of Suharto's regime. If it's not Prabowo (a really nasty piece of work if there ever was one), could she really be thinking of teaming up with Golkar? It was during Golkar's heyday in power that she was deposed as leader of her party as she was getting too popular.

But forget the little people, forget what her new friends did to those who stood by her in the dark days of the New Order. The important thing is to get to the palace and spend another term cutting ribbons and doing little else.

By the way, if she does win, look out for a constitutional crisis if she wants to stay in office for a second term. Article 7 of the Constitution states, "The President and Vice President hold office for a term of five years and can afterwards be elected to the same office, for one other term only", but she didn't serve a full term first time....

That Other Election

Indonesia has temporarily forgotten all about its own election to focus all its attention on events the other side of the world, presumably to the puzzlement of people who think their own problems are more worthy of attention than those of the USA.

If you thought the global coverage of Obama's victory was hysterical ("On every level America will be changed by this result - its impact will be so profound that the nation will never be the same."said the BBC. Hmm. Including the geology? And of course it won't - nowhere ever is! It's called entropy), come to Indonesia. As the young Obama spent time in Jakarta - his mother remarried an Indonesian and moved here - the Indonesian media rapidly abandoned all pretense of impartiality and devoted pages and pages (and hours and hours) to their adopted son. As a result, the opinion on news portal detik.com (which they shrewdly started charging people to vote on!) saw McCain's rating at around 7% right until polling day. The fact that Obama's father was Muslim sealed it for many.

And this really shows the lack of political maturity among many here. In the same way that Megawati Sukarnoputri is wildly popular because she is the daughter of Indonesia's founding president, Obama is popular because he once lived in Jakarta and had a Muslim father. Never mind the issues.... For example his stance on abortion is at odds with the majority opinion here.

And more to the point, what are the odds that an ethnic Chinese Indonesian, or a non-Muslim Indonesian, will ever become president? And will losing candidates ever learn to accept defeat graciously? Not if the last election is anything to go by. Losing candidate Megawati went into a sulk, and refused to concede defeat, saying that she had not lost, merely experienced a drop in her vote.

Anyway, congratulations to Barack Obama, and commiserations to John McCain. You can both teach Indonesia a lot about winning and losing.

Remember the legislative election anyone?

According to a survey by Kompas newspaper last week, only 20 percent of Indonesian voters know that the legislative elections will be held in April 2009. And it's not surprising. After a flurry of interest (in the form of celebs and flags) politicians and commentators seem to have lost interest in the elections to the House of Representatives and to be focusing all their attention on the real prize: the presidential palace.


On Wednesday 29 October, the House more or less agreed on the formula for the Presidential Election Law. The parties with the largest share of seats in the House agreed that presidential candidates can be nominated by parties or groupings of parties with at last 25 percent of seats in the House or that won at least 20 percent of the vote in the legislative election. This will mean no more than three or four candidate pairings. The National Mandate Party, which doesn't stand a chance of winning this many votes or seats on its own, is still sulking and a judicial review is not out of the question. Meanwhile the United Development Party (currently with 11% of seats) has said that it is "attracted" to incumbent president SBY as a candidate because if his anti-corruption efforts. SBY may need the help of a large party as his Democratic Party vehicle (currently with 10% of seats) is likely to need help to get him reelected. And in other developments (as they say), Golkar (23% of seats) and the other front-runner, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) (20%) seem to be getting closer.

But in the midst of all this bickering and flirting, everybody seems to have forgotten the legislative vote comes first. The date for the presidential poll has not even been set yet...