Ikrar Nusa Bhakti, Kyoto
Indonesia is facing hullabaloo politics in 2008, one year ahead of the 2009 legislative and presidential elections. All individual politicians and political parties will prepare political agendas to be delivered during the 2009 campaigns. “Early political campaigns” or “veiled political campaigns” by eventual presidential candidates will be upon us in 2008, if not already begun in 2007.
Socio-political organizations, those affiliated with political parties and those not, will be submitting their proposals to the political parties’ chairmen and organizations about what the former can do during the campaign period. Of course, with the hope they will get “political projects” from political parties.
It is interesting to note the same non-affiliated groups will probably submit their proposals to many political parties of differing ideologies and even to different presidential candidates. They do it for the sake of money and not out of their political beliefs.
Political gatherings, demonstrations and statements of “complete determination or strong will” (kebulatan tekad) to support prospective presidential candidates will be reverberating in every corner of the country. Those who want to be appointed as ministers in the next cabinet are now trying to approach a new prospective leader or to show their loyalty to the present president.
At the same time, quite a number of conglomerates or economic tycoons will be very busy with their political and economic calculations about to whom they should pour their money and how much to each presidential candidate, as part of the practice of “corruption and kickbacks.” In other words, Indonesian politics becomes noisy in 2008.
The presidential election, for presidential candidates, is mostly understood as a time to deliver “declarations of intent” which are more “political rhetoric” without any political substance. In other words, most of their political campaigns are actually “The Statement of the Unaspirational”.
It means they just make political statements about what the people want to hear, but they themselves are really not sure whether they will be able deliver their promises once in power. Look at the political campaign of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Muhammad Jusuf Kalla as presidential and vice presidential candidates during the presidential election 2004.
They promised a tri-fold agenda to make Indonesia more secure, just and prosperous with the slogan of “Together We Can”. During his first two years in office, President Yudhoyono also promised to implement socioeconomic strategies to improve the socioeconomic conditions of the people, namely pro-growth, pro-job and pro-poor. However, if we read the media coverage about what the people of Sirnagalih said to the president, we see they never enjoyed all the socioeconomic programs promised by the government.
To be fair, the present government has delivered on its promise to improve national security and also has successfully maintained Indonesia’s national integration, namely by resolving the Aceh conflict through the Helsinki Peace Accord between the Government of Indonesia and the Aceh Freedom Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka) on Aug. 15, 2005.
However, the present government has not been successful in improving the socioeconomic lives of the ordinary people.
The Legislative election, for its part, centers around how to get a seat in the House of Representatives and the Regional Representatives Council, rather than how to represent the people appropriately.
Democracy in Indonesia is presumably understood by politicians as how to win in the elections just for the sake of power, prestige and their own pocket rather than how to win their political agenda for the interests of the Indonesian people at large.
For most people, democracy is limited to general elections every five years. And general elections, as during the Soeharto period, is only a “political gathering” or a “cafeteria of politics” where people have a chance to choose any “political menus” appealing to them, and after that they just wait another five years to vote again in the next election.
Both politicians and the ordinary people are very rarely able to communicate to each other. If they communicate, however, it mostly, again, is a political campaign which receives full media coverage and no follow-up in government decisions or political debates in parliament about how to improve socioeconomic conditions for ordinary people.
It seems most politicians both in the executive and legislative bodies have never thought about “transaction costs” in the political processes. They have used so much of the public’s money, but what about the economic results for the ordinary people?
Hullabaloo politics in Indonesia, every five years, is caused by the political reality that, first, unlike in the countries with matured democracies, Indonesia has no standard political regulations which can be used in every general election, presidential and legislative.
Every five years the national parliament must process and produce new laws and regulations related to political parties, the presidential election and the legislative election. The Parliament does not just amend a few chapters or several articles to replace the previous ones, but always discuss matters from the very beginning. It has wasted a lot of energy and public money just for the sake of politics.
The political process in the parliament related to those issues has mostly centered on how political parties or individual members of parliament will benefit from the political laws they make, and also on how to practice “horse trading politics” among political parties re-examining the bill article by article, rather producing the best quality political laws which can be used in the long-term.
Second, Indonesia is one of the few countries in the world where ideology of political parties has no meaning. Quite a number of politicians in Indonesia exercise the so-called “freelance belief” and “free-wheeling” style. They can withdraw and transfer from one party to another whenever they like.
Although political parties try to show their ideological differences, particularly during the discussion of articles related to political parties, they always jump on the bandwagon in great numbers to support who will win or won the presidential seat, no matter their ideological differences. The only exception is the political stand of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, after the presidential election of 2004, which chose to become an opposition party.
Third, related to the previous point, Indonesia has a problem of inclusive government versus political fragmentation, or inclusive government versus political practice. As mentioned above, since 1999 either Abdurrahman Wahid, Megawati Soekarnoputri or Yudhoyono has always tried to establish the so-called “Rainbow Cabinet”, including almost all political parties with different ideologies in the government wagon.
The political consequence of this kind of government is the difficulty it finds in achieving consensus among members of the cabinet and establishing an effective government. Since 2007 there has also been a tendency to open presidential and legislative elections to independent candidates and to broaden political inclusiveness.
However, it is likely this approach will endanger Indonesia’s transition to consolidated democracy since it will create political fragmentation and weaken the democratic institutions, such as political parties and the election, which have not successfully been institutionalized.
Fourth, all political parties are financially dependent on the outside sources, which results in the practice of corruption and kickbacks. Thus it is not surprising that in the new law on political parties the total allowed political donations has increased.
One can say that there is no correlation between democracy and economic prosperity, but in order to consolidate our democracy, it is time for politicians to calculate transaction costs and the goal of democracy, namely economic prosperity for the ordinary people.
The writer is a senior researcher at the Research Center for Political Studies at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan.
