INDONESIAN ELECTION DEBATES ARE SO POLITE

                       Vote patriotism – who wouldn’t?
 
Impossible to imagine:  Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten start a pre-election national TV debate with handshakes and hugs.  Two and a half hours later after gently tapping a few verbal shuttlecocks to-and-fro they pledge to remain friends forever.

That was the scene in Indonesia last weekend when President Joko Widodo and challenger Prabowo Subianto faced off 18 days ahead of the election. A Kompas national daily headline called the show ‘dynamic’; the writer must have been dozing between commercial breaks. 

It was managed by the General Electoral Commission (KPU) which will be supervising booths for the 194 million registered voters on 17 April. 

The ‘debate’ was supposed to help the country get a clear idea of the candidates’ policies. Instead they competed to be the most passionate flag-embracers.  Though the 18^th century English writer Samuel Johnson’s dictum that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’ is little known in Indonesia, voters understand jingoism masks a dearth of policies and an absence of solutions. 

Subianto alleged that Widodo’s office was spreading false rumours that the disgraced former soldier would introduce sharia law if elected. 

This is the Islamic legal system which includes public floggings for homosexuality and unmarried couples being together.  It already applies in the North Sumatra province of Aceh.

Wagging a finger and in a parade-ground bellow Subianto pledged support for Pancasila, the nation’s foundation policy.   

Pancasila (five principles) was devised by first President Soekarno to keep the nation nominally secular and thwart attempts by hard-liners to make the nation Islamic.

All Indonesians are supposed to believe in ‘the one and only God’, a just and civilized humanity, a unified nation, democratic and led by the ‘wisdom of the representatives of the people’, and social justice for all.

Like most motherhood statements it’s flexible.  Hinduism – mainly practised in Bali - is polytheistic, while democracy has been absent till recently.  If ‘social justice’ means the poor and minorities can exercise equal rights, then it’s a misnomer. 

According to an Oxfam report Indonesia is now: ‘the sixth country of greatest wealth inequality in the world … the four richest men in Indonesia have more wealth than the combined total of the poorest 100 million people.’

There’s no formal equivalent of Pancasila in Australia where we usually shrink from displays of loyalty to the state; the best example would be the Pledge of Allegiance in the US.

Pancasila is taught in high schools but Prabowo wants it extended to primary schools and universities up to doctoral level.  No dissent from Widodo.  Opposing would have been like banning dawn services on 25 April.

Under second President Soeharto, who was deposed in 1998 following years of corruption, Pancasila took a rest.

It was rapidly revived by Widodo to offset the growth of militant Islam, particularly after Jakarta Governor Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama was jailed for two years for blasphemy.  This followed huge protests organized in late 2016 by Islamists against the ‘double-minority’ politician – he’s Protestant and ethnic Chinese.

Blame for the blandness of the TV debate lies partly with the nervous KPU which set rigid rules, disallowing personal attacks.  Prabowo skirted this prohibition by blaming Widodo’s staff for bad briefings of their boss.

Questions and answers were confined to short timed grabs which were more personality show-offs than policy statements with rupiah price tags.  

More revealing was the body language. Prabowo has bounced back from his 1998 military discharge for ‘misinterpreting orders’ regarding the alleged kidnapping and torture of activists, to claim he’s now more army than the army. He’s become a plump, brasher Southeast Asian version of Trump.  He swaggered and hectored.

Widodo, who could get a job as a menswear model if he loses, has been fronting huge rallies around the nation.  He looked exhausted and on two occasions sat down without filling his allotted time.  

Short of the President being caught in flagrante delicto with a gay Chinese Communist, and despite looking like he’d rather be home than on the hustings, he’s still predicted to win a second five-year term by a substantial margin.

This is because prices in markets and bowsers have largely stayed stable, while new toll-roads, ports, trains (including Jakarta’s first Mass Rapid Transport system) are obvious signs of Widodo’s can-do commitment to infrastructure.

He’s a poor public speaker, no match for his blowhard rival, but still maintains his man-of-the-people image.  Prabowo, who was educated in the US, threw in a few English phrases which made no contextual sense.

He wants more spent on defence though there are no threats on any horizon; big boys need big toys.  Later, said Widodo, let’s first find jobs for the kids and promote free trade, like the deal with Australia.

Voters who want a return to father-knows-best government rather than the messy business of democracy, will have been impressed by Prabowo.  But they’re on his side already.

The danger facing mild-mannered Widodo is not that his yawning supporters will switch sides, but will stay in bed on polling day, a national holiday. Booths close at 1 pm. This is such a worry there’s a major campaign against golput (no shows).

Based on the President’s TV performance the only reason for bothering to vote is to make sure the world’s third largest democracy (after India and the US) doesn’t revert to being the world’s second largest autocracy behind China. 

First published in Pearls and Irritations 2 April 2019
http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-vote-patriotism-who-wouldnt/

WAITING TIME, WORRYING TIMES

The count’s not over                                                        

As foreshadowed in On Line Opinion earlier this month, Indonesians are facing a potentially explosive situation with no clear winner from the 9 July direct vote for a new president.

But thank God for Ramadhan.  Literally.  The Islamic fasting month is the principal reason volcanic chaos hasn’t erupted following the keenly contested result.

It’s not easy seething over statistics when hunger gnaws and the mind is supposed to be concentrating on matters pious, not political.

The liberal - progressive’s poster boy, mellow Joko Widodo (Jokowi) remains in front by about five percentage points according to exit polls labelled ‘credible’ by Western observers. Not so says his rival, former three-star general and tungsten-tough Prabowo Subianto.  He stoutly asserts his polling reverses Jokowi’s reported lead.

The disputed figures are the result of the so-called ‘quick counts’, not the official result which should be released on 22 July.  Whatever the determination, appeals to the Constitutional Court are expected - so no winner declared till late August.

Even then a settle down is unlikely should Prabowo lose. Few believe that the alleged human rights abuser discharged from the army for exceeding his authority will shake the winner’s hand, then gracefully retire to breed Portuguese Lusitano warmbloods.

Prabowo, 62, campaigned with foam-flecked intensity for a nostalgic return to the simple and certain era of his former father-in-law, the kleptocrat dictator Soeharto who ruled Indonesia for 32 years till toppled in 1998 by pro-democracy students.

Prabowo’s grandstanding campaign style, which included reviews of his uniformed ‘troops’ from the saddle of a high-stepping stallion, reminded historians of Il Duce, the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini. One French journalist cleverly dubbed him Putin van Jawa.

Admitting defeat won’t come easy for a patrician who believes only he was born to rule the world’s fourth largest nation, not some provincial pleb.  Jokowi, a former furniture salesman and small town mayor turned Jakarta Governor, campaigned on a ‘mental revolution’ platform. This included reforming the bureaucracy, embracing modern business practices, eliminating nepotism and responding to the voices of ordinary Indonesians.

He appealed because he was seen as a clean break from the corrupt and incestuous Jakarta oligarchy that’s long controlled an archipelago of 250 million people, most of them Muslim.

Prabowo has already formed a coalition that dominates the Legislative Assembly (DPR).  It includes the hard-right Islamic parties and could frustrate a Jokowi-led attempt to advance reform policies even if he’s given the people’s mandate to do just that.

So far the protests have been verbal because voters are more concerned with their religious and cultural duties. These include mudik, visiting families in distant villages, journeys that are already constipating the highways.

The painful movements will peak during the Idul Fitri holiday at the end of July. Though scheduled for just two days the celebrations can extend to two weeks as workers overstay with relatives.

In this environment it’s hard for even the most intense supporter to muster enough enthusiasm for a good demo.  This is despite ample evidence that there’s reason to worry, as foreign commentators have noted.

Ed Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner from the Australian National University have been in Indonesia monitoring the election and writing scathingly about Prabowo.  Example:

“During the election campaign, Prabowo Subianto posed as a democrat. In fact, he protested regularly against being portrayed as a ‘dictator’—even in his last Facebook message to supporters before the election, he complained about the non-democratic image given to him by unspecified forces.

“Now, however, he delivers the final piece of evidence that he truly is a would-be autocrat who has no respect for the will of the people and would stop at nothing to win power, even if he has to lie and cheat his way to the presidency.”

According to the academics that evidence of Prabowo planning to “steal the presidential result” includes supporters bribing electoral officials, sowing confusion and stirring the possum with fake survey results.

There are widespread claims of malpractice, including attempts at vote buying and intimidation of electors.  In some booths not one vote was recorded for Jokowi in what are supposed to be secret ballots. In others officials reportedly defaced votes for Jokowi making them ineligible.

The police, who are supposed to be guarding the process, are notoriously corrupt.  So are many bureaucrats; after the general election in April around 100 electoral staff were sacked for illegal practices.

Jokowi was a late entrant into the presidential race. In local government he became famous for his Javanese consensus-style problem solving. He was handpicked by Megawati Soekarnoputri, the head of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) when it became clear the daughter of first president Soekarno would lose if she stood as planned.

The campaign, run by her daughter Puan Maharani, was reported to be underfunded and clumsy, kept in play only through the smartness of volunteers. It was little contest for the professional show staged by Prabowo’s battalions.  They were backed by his Croesus-rich brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo and the major commercial television stations, the source of most information for Indonesians.

Next came the dishing of dirt that found acceptance in an electorate that prefers gossip to researched and verifiable news. Jokowi was labelled a communist, a Chinese and a secret Christian with an agenda to convert the nation.

He was slow to respond, preferring to stay out of a gutter fight.  Morally-right, politically wrong. Three days before the election he flew to Mecca to pray for success – and prove his Islamic credentials.

There are daily demands from supporters for their opponents to concede defeat, and occasional pleas for the current president and former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to intervene. 

This won’t happen – the General Elections Commission (KPU) has to make the call; Yudhoyono, who has run the nation for the past ten years and is constitutionally barred from continuing in office, has already poisoned his impartiality.  His Democratic Party backed Prabowo.

Indonesia’s seventh president will be sworn in for what should be a five year term on 20 October.  The weeks till then will be a time of living dangerously.  So could the months beyond.

(First published in On Line Opinion, 21 July 2014: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=16514 )

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