No Islam Please, We're Nationalists

Indonesia's electors seem to have tired of Islamic parties. In the recent legislative elections, the major Islamic parties won just under 30% of the vote, and 164 seats in the House of Representatives. In 2004, they won over 40% of the vote and 231 seats. And in the forthcoming presidential election, there are no candidates from Islamic parties - defying the conventional wisdom (as applied in 2004) that a Nationalist-Islamist mix is best.

Voters are apparently disillusioned with the Islamists for two reasons. Firstly, despite their religious credentials, they have turned out to be no less susceptible to the temptations of corruption and the flesh - or both in at least one case. Secondly in those areas where they control the local legislature, they have shown a disturbing tendency to impose variants of Islamic Shariah law. On a national level, they pushed for the Pornography Law, which threatens to outlaw harmless activities such as Balinese women wearing little above the waist and everybody doing yoga. However President SBY supported this law in the hope of gaining support from the Islamist parties and their voters. Oops. The latest demonstration of the odd obsessions of the Islamic authorities here is their ongoing debate about whether to rule against Facebook on the grounds of its immoral pictures of women, which may corrupt the morals of young men in Islamic Boarding schools (who by all accounts access as much porn as they can whenever they get their hands on an internet-equipped computer).

Although SBY was at pains to point out the Islamic faith of his running mate in the lavish declaration of his candidacy, partly to pacify the Islamic parties in his coalition who were sulking because one of their number was not recruited for the number two job, nobody seems to mind. We can expect to see high-profile visits to mosques and other demonstrations of piety by candidates (by the way, aren't crimes against humanity against Islamic law?), but it looks as if politics and Islam are going their separate ways. Good.

Counting...Counting...Gone!

Beginning shortly after the polls closed on April 9, the General Elections Commission's (KPU) website was updated with the latest votes counted for each party nationally. News portal detik.com had their own count, which displayed pretty much the same numbers. For a few days the KPU website was updated almost hourly. Then on April 29 1t 12:39pm the site announced that the updates had stopped with 14,739,196 votes counted . Shortly after that the special website went offline. Then a few days later, on May 5, the detik.com site resumed, with 80,231,512 votes counted. Since than the total has climbed to 100,028, 285 in fits and starts, with an update or two every day.

Meanwhile, on May 4, a new section of the KPU website appeared with detailed election results from the individual electoral regions, of which there are 77. Strangely the results for Aceh showed a vote of 0 for all six of the local parties (Aceh is the only province where local parties were allowed to stand). Pemiloopy was able to save the results as they appeared - the totals were downloadable in PDF. However once the results from three of East Java's 11 electoral regions posted, the updating stopped, and that section of the KPU website has also disappeared. East Java is the province where there were widespread allegations of fraud in the gubernatorial election last year. It is also the stronghold of the divided National Awakening Party and a region where the Gerindra vehicle of disgraced former general Prabowo was hoping to trick farmers into voting for him.

So, with one day remaining for the KPU to announce the final result, as required by Article 201 (1) of the Law No. 10/2008, the earlier transparency has gone, and it is by no means certain the increasingly incompetent Commission will even get this right. We shall see tomorrow...

STOP PRESS: The KPU has said, nay confirmed, that the final results of the elections will be announced at 7:30PM on Saturday May 9, in line with the legally mandated schedule, according to detik.com. Of the 77 electoral regions, the counting has been finished in all but two. The invitations have gone out and all parties will be present for the big event at the KPU building.