CAMPAIGN FATIGUE

 YAWNING DEMOCRACY IN INDONESIA

Is it possible to overdose on politics?  In Indonesia, yes. There’s a month left before the 14 February deciding date - and the road signs are showing wear and tear.

Literally, because the kerbside vinyl  banners featuring the faces of fist-shaking or praying candidates (it’s difficult to do both)  are getting flipped and ripped by the monsoon winds and rains now drenching Java.  

The campaigners’ teams aren’t mustering much energy to repair, suggesting  funds are as exhausted as enthusiasm.

Apart from social media, Indonesians get their voting info from the giant billboards polluting the streetscape - and TV.

The third of five scheduled debates between the three main contenders for the presidency was screened last Sunday - a blessing for insomniacs.

 US-educated former academic and Jakarta Governor Dr Anies Baswedan, one time Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo and cashiered general Prabowo Subianto tried to keep interest afloat.

But the show’s producers schooled in TV game shows thought this should be a flashy fun event, as though the winner would be waved away with a beribboned new motorbike rather than  the prize of running the world’s fourth largest country.

Apart from having more Muslims than any other nation while remaining constitutionally secular, Indonesia is also the third largest democracy - of a sort - though only this century.

For the 32 preceding years it was an autocracy-cum-kleptocracy known as Orde Baru (New Order) run by General Soeharto who ousted founding President Soekarno in an anti-Communist coup.

The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Indonesia a "flawed democracy" because of its limited accountability to voters, meaning parties stitch up deals without consulting members.

One expert has been blunter with the lable “a state of disorder” .  His reasoning is that President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo has “partnered with corrupt politicians, military figures, bureaucrats and businesses, who then used their influence to repurpose democratic institutions for the interests of their survival.”

Like Trump’s villainy doesn’t seem to worry GOP supporters in the US, Widodo’s alleged flaws haven’t stopped him recording popularity ratings above 80 percent, largely because he used to look like an ordinary bloke - one of us.  No longer.

Some readers may recall he took then PM Malcolm Turnbull to a market in 2015 where the two men were swamped by fans.  

That blusukan (impromptu visit) style has faded with tightened security, but his successes have been substantial:  New toll roads, railway lines and airports - plus health  insurance that so far seems to be doing better than Medicare in getting the needy into surgeries.

The Constitution limits him to two five-year terms, so his eldest son Gibran Rakabuming Raka, 36, has abandoned the PDI-P party of his father to couple as vice-president hopeful with Prabowo in a bid to create a dynasty.

To those raised in the political religion of the Westminster System  this arrangement is totally weird.  But it works in Indonesia because personalities are far more important than policies.

Gibran is young enough to be Prabowo’s grandson, so the image-makers have been erasing lines and creases on one man’s phiz - and adding to the other.

The TV producers thought it better to get acclaimed academics to put questions in sealed envelopes instead of asking seasoned journos to toss curlies.  This resulted in queries about geospatial technology, which your correspondent can guarantee is not foremost in the minds of hungry voters counting their rupiah.

This didn’t matter because the candidates ignored the questions and just said what they wanted, rarely bothering to explain how they’ll build the nation’s food security.  Once an exporter of rice Indonesia now relies on India and Vietnam to cope with more mouths.

Unrestrained building of homes and roads has seen once super-fertile lands covered by concrete and asphalt, an irreversible loss.

Polls in Indonesia are unreliable, so the indicators that Prabowo is the leading contender should get be treated with handfuls of salt.  But he seems to be outspending his opponents so getting more publicity.

His father-knows-best appeal is that he’ll return Indonesia to the state of low prices and little social disorder because the military will fix everything. In the mid 1980s a series of extra-judicial killings called petrus cleaned up real or imagined criminal gangs in big cities.

Prabowo’s opponents try to remind voters that the divorced son-in-law of Soeharto was banned from the US for many years because of alleged human rights abuses, including the 1998 kidnapping and disappearance of protesting students. He responds by saying that’s stuff from the past and it’s time to look ahead.

Like Trump, his wild assertions that Indonesia is being exploited by outsiders determined to break up the ‘unitary State’ and plunder its mineral wealth go largely unchallenged in the media.

Voting is not compulsory. The 2019 election saw a turnout of around 83 per cent when Jokowi trounced Prabowo by ten points.  The loser’s supporters then rioted with eight killed and around 300 injured in post-poll riots.   

Instead of being condemned, Prabowo was rewarded with the Defence Ministry - and that’s not a misprint.  With this platform he’s been able to convince some that he’s no longer a brutal authoritarian leftover from the Orde Baru, but a cuddly gramps.

If the Valentine’s Day vote isn’t a massacre but a run-off as no one contender scores more than 50 per cent of the vote, there’ll be a run-off on 26 June.  Then the electors will have to find the energy to do it all again.  

First published in Independent Australia 10 January 2024: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/indonesia-failing-to-inject-energy-into-upcoming-election,18227