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.