http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1876&Itemid=175
Indonesia Clears the Decks for a Presidential Election
Written by Our Correspondent
Monday, 18 May 2009
Page 1 of 2
Reformasi rears its unlikely head
With weeks of horse-trading since Indonesia's April national legislative
elections now over, three major coalitions are set for the presidential
election on July 8. Despite the fact that there is not a single new face in the
lineup of top candidates and that two of the major participants are accused
murderers, the island nation seems to be increasingly on the road to the
reformasi process that began with the fall of the strongman Suharto in 1998.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Friday confirmed what had widely been
expected, that he had selected as his running mate Boediono, the governor of
Bank Indonesia, the country's central bank, over the objections of three of
Yudhoyono's Islamist coalition members, the Prosperous Justice Party, the
National Mandate Party and the United Development Party, who argued that
Yudhoyono's No. 2 should come from one of their Muslim ranks.
Yudhoyono's selection of Boediono vaults a technocrat into position to
replace the outgoing Vice President Jusuf Kalla, who, having been spurned by
Yudhoyono for a second term, is running on his own for the presidency with
retired Gen. Wiranto of the People's Conscience Party, who was accused of
allowing mass killings, torture and a panoply of other crimes in attempting to
prevent East Timor from breaking away from Indonesia in 1999.
The 66-year-old Boediono is somewhat a reluctant candidate, having left
politics to move to the central bank, and is widely regarded as honest and
incorruptible in a country where those adjectives are rarely used. However,
Yudhoyono is making a calculated choice in selecting him because in doing so he
has forsworn the formidable political base that Kalla, a businessman, commanded
through the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or Kadin.
Kalla's demise is considerable. He is the head of the once-dominant
Golkar Party, through which Suharto threw the thinnest of veils of what he
called "guided democracy" across Indonesia during his 32-year reign. In
Yudhoyono's initial run in 2004, the Democratic party was so small that he
needed Golkar and Kalla to head the coalition that would give him the combined
strength to fulfill electoral mandates so that he could run.
In the recent April legislative elections, however, Golkar's voter
numbers fell to 14.5 percent, with both leader and party widely regarded across
the nation as far more beholden to the business community than to the
electorate at large. Although Yudhoyono is hardly regarded as decisive, his
coalition's ties to Golkar and Kalla during his first term meant that real
reform of the government, which is too often used as a cash register for
businessmen, would be problematic from the first.
In particular, Golkar's demise and the rise of the technocrats raises the
question of what happens with Aburizal Bakrie, whose companies provide 40
percent of Indonesia's stock market capitalization and who played a major role,
through Kadin, in funding the Yudhoyono-Kalla ticket in 2004. Twice the
government bailed Bakrie companies out of financial disaster although that
didn't happen in the current global financial crisis when they melted down the
stock market in October last year. Bakrie is now the Coordinating Minister for
People's Welfare. He has already said he would step out of a formal government
position. What role he takes, formal or informal, will be a signal of what
direction the new government -- should Yudhoyono and Boediono win -- will take
The third coalition is headed by former President Megawati Sukarnoputri,
who lost to Yudhoyono in 2004 after a largely listless term in office.
Megawati, who heads the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, chose as her
vice president former Gen. Prabowo Subianto about an hour before midnight
Friday after the terminally ambitious and hugely well funded Prabowo finally
gave up his own aspirations to run for president. Prabowo's Gerindra Party,
despite vast amounts of money for advertising, managed only 4.46 percent of the
seats in the April election.
Like Wiranto, Prabowo, the former head of the controversial special
forces unit Kopassus, has been accused of fomenting a wide range of murders,
rapes, riots and other crimes in the effort to abort East Timor rule. Over
recent days, the families of murdered students and ethnic Chinese Indonesians
who were raped, murdered and brutalized in 1998 riots that left Jakarta's
Chinatown in flames and hundreds dead have held press conferences to denounce
the two. But there seems little impetus to ever bring the two before the bar of
justice. Prabowo is divorced from to Suharto's daughter Titiek, who has
continued to wield a certain amount of sway and continues to control a
considerable amount of the country's wealth despite the family's disgrace after
her father fell from power.
Whether either of the Kalla-Wiranto or Megawati-Prabowo coalitions has
any chance at all is problematical. Many regard Yudhoyono's election as a
foregone conclusion. The struggle of the two other coalitions to come up with
what they regarded as viable electoral teams is an indication of their
weakness. The inability of Megawati and Prabowo to form a coalition at all,
which led election commission chairman Abdu hafiz Anshary to hold registrations
open til midnight Saturday because of the flurry of last-minute talks, is an
indication of their plight.
One extraordinary opinion poll by the Strategic Center for Development
and Policy Review in late April said that if the election had been held at that
time, Yudhoyono would have garnered a whopping 87.5 percent of the votes,
trailed at a long distance by Megawati with only 5.83 percent and Kalla at only
1.67 percent.
Indonesia's polling organizations are notoriously inaccurate. Those
figures have since moderated - if they were accurate at all - to ranges between
a still-astounding 66 percent to 70 percent, spurring many observers to say
they fear the voters appear eager to deliver up a mandate for a return to the
Javanese style of reign rather than rule that Suharto enjoyed during his
decades in power.
Whether that is true or not, for the short-term at least Indonesia looks
in remarkably good shape. Yudhoyono appears to want to at least attempt to
forge a cabinet dominated by such figures as Trade Minister E Mari Pangestu and
Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, two women who have been called in the
past SBY's Angels, a reference to the once-popular television show Charlie's
Angels. Despite his lack of a political base, Boediono adds to that stable of
technocrats.
Concerns about rising Islamization are waning despite the fact that
Yudhoyono's coalition includes three Islamic parties. Religion and ethnicity
appear to be losing their hold as factors in voter preferences over the pairing
of candidates to run in the July race, a survey released on Thursday by the
Indonesian Survey Institute concluded. The survey, which questioned 2,014
people in 33 provinces from April 20 to 27, said voters were abandoning the
long-held conviction that joint tickets should strike a balance between
representatives from an Islamic party and a secular party, or Javanese and
non-Javanese backgrounds.
If no slate gets 51 percent of the vote in the July polls, the two
winning slates will have to return to the voters in September. But given
Yudhoyono's strength in the polls, most observers feel a runoff is unlikely.
That should leave the new presidential team with the chance to take up the
reins to run a country that is faring rather well and far different from the
shambles that greeted reformasi in 1999. Against all the odds, Indonesia
recorded 4.4 percent economic growth for the first quarter of the year, leading
the entire 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations. With its vast
consumer base of 230 million people and relatively small dependence on exports,
it has largely been insulated from the depredations of the global financial
meltdown, although credit remains constricted, with banks refusing to lend and
companies having to resort to bond issuance rather than loans.
Cleaning up the judicial system has to rank at the top of Yudhono's list.
Whatever success the government has had in cleaning up corruption largely rests
on the performance of the Corruption Eradication Commission and little else.
The commission takes its cases to its own special court and has a 100 percent
conviction rate. Corruption cases taken to regular courts rank far below that.
Much more typical is the case of Lily Widjaja, the president director of
Merrill Lynch Indonesia and chairwoman of the Indonesian Brokerages
Association, who last week was charged with embezzlement, malicious intent and
defamation by the National Police over a long-running dispute between
Renaissance Capital, an Indonesian investment bank, in which Renaissance is
claiming compensation for losses amounting to US$100 million from Merrill in
what appears to be a purely commercial dispute. That raises the question
whether once again Indonesian businessmen are able to use the country's police
and courts as a cudgel to pound their opponents into submission.
Yudhoyono also has to contend with a legislature, many of whose 560
members, including lots from his own party, regard electoral office as a
license to steal. Businessmen are watching the newly elected lawmakers with a
mixture of suspense and unease to see how they will perform. The indefatigable
Corruption Eradication Commission so far has jailed and prosecuted successfully
nine members of parliament and has its eyes on a half dozen more despite the
fact that its own chairman is currently in jail on suspicion of ordering a
gang-land style murder.
It is going to take a long time to change Indonesia's culture of
corruption, which Transparency International ranks it 126th of 180 countries,
tied with five other paragons such as Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guyana and Honduras.
The April election itself, although most observers say it was relatively
corruption free, was a circus of incompetence, lost ballots, late counts and
other irregularities. Nonetheless, the signs are more hopeful than they have
been for a long time.
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