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Indonesia sets an example
Nov 19th 2008
The largest Muslim country will stage a remarkable feat of democracy
In 2009 Indonesia will mount an impressive spectacle of popular choice,
in which around 174m voters across 14,000 tropical islands will choose a
president and vice-president and 560 parliamentarians. The chances are
good that, as in the previous national elections in 2004, polling will
be mostly peaceful and that the overwhelming majority of successful
candidates will be committed to a pluralistic Indonesia with freedom of
both speech and religion. Once again, the world’s most populous Muslim
country will demonstrate that there is nothing incompatible between
practising Islam and being democratic.
This achievement will be all the more remarkable considering where
Indonesia was just ten years ago: in chaos. After three decades in
power, the authoritarian regime of President Suharto had collapsed amid
rioting and no one knew what might take its place. Could such a huge,
diverse and impoverished archipelago, with hundreds of ethnic groups,
possibly hold together, given the weakness and corruption of its
national institutions?
Since then the country has consistently surprised on the upside, even if
the pace of reform has been ploddingly slow. Indonesia’s shattered
finances have been repaired. It has developed a free press. The army’s
hands have been prised from the levers of power. And, above all,
Indonesia has become a democracy in which the voters can chuck out their
government. Freedom House, an American think-tank, now rates Indonesia
as the only completely free country in South-East Asia—putting its
richer neighbours, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, to shame.
The 2004 elections allowed Indonesians, for the first time, to choose
their president directly. The man they selected, Susilo Bambang
Yudhoyono, a liberal ex-general, was deemed by international observers
to have been the wisest choice from those on offer. Though the
speculation about possible presidential candidates and governing
coalitions has already begun, the parties will wait and see how they do
in the legislative elections in April before entering into serious talks
about the presidential vote (whose first round will be in July with a
run-off, if needed, a few months later).
Even so, it is quite likely that the two main presidential contenders
will be the same as last time: Mr Yudhoyono and his immediate
predecessor, Megawati Sukarnoputri. Mr Yudhoyono’s popularity has been
dented by decisions to cut fuel and electricity subsidies, so as to
avert financial ruin and redirect state spending towards the poorest.
Miss Megawati has been on a meet-the-people comeback tour since early
2008 and has benefited from discontent over rising living costs. Yet the
election is Mr Yudhoyono’s to lose.
A few other candidates will run, probably including Wiranto, a former
army chief indicted by a UN-backed tribunal over the violence that
accompanied the breakaway of the former East Timor in 1999. Mr Wiranto
will argue that an old-fashioned strongman is what the country needs but
it will be surprising if he does any better than the third place he got
in 2004. Golkar, the party that used to support Suharto, is now led by
Vice-President Jusuf Kalla but his opinion-poll ratings are probably too
weak for him to win the presidency. Thus Golkar may, as in the second
round in 2004, offer him for the vice-presidential slot on Mr
Yudhoyono’s ticket.
Whereas the presidential race will feature some very familiar
personalities, the parliamentary contests will also introduce fresher
faces. In recent elections for provincial governors, voters have spurned
established figures. This has convinced the main parties that they will
need an infusion of new blood to do well in the parliamentary races:
Miss Megawati’s Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) says up
to 70% of its candidates will be newcomers.
The country has consistently surprised on the upside
At first sight the parliamentary elections look like a recipe for
confusion. There will be something like 12,000 candidates from 38
parties battling for the 560 seats. This is a big increase on the
numbers in 2004 but the next parliament will in fact be less fragmented
than the current one. This is mainly because a new rule requires parties
to get at least 2.5% of the national vote to win any seats. Of the 17
parties that won seats in 2004 only eight would have met that test.
Furthermore, several mid-sized parties, such as the National Awakening
Party of Abdurrahman Wahid (president in 1999-2001), are riven by
splits. So the new parliament will be dominated by Golkar, the PDI-P and
Mr Yudhoyono’s Democrats—all of which are staunchly secularist—plus the
mildly Islamist Prosperous Justice Party (PKS). The PKS, like the
smaller Islamist parties, has found that moderating its calls for
sharia and embracing pluralism is the only way to win new votes. It
will be the cost of living that dominates the campaign, not theology.
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