PDI-P CONGRESS: PARTY BEFORE PRESIDENT

Mega eyes our voting
system       

Where's Wally?  The PDI-P promotes its congress, 
but not the nation's president, who's also a red jacket.  
The image on the top left
opposite Megawati is of her father, Soekarno (d 1970)
                                        

Megawati Soekarnoputri (the second name is a patronymic -
daughter of Soekarno) doesn’t want direct elections. That’s what she told
applauding delegates at the Bali conference this month (April) of her Partai Demokrasi Indonesia – Perjuangan
(PDI-P – the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle.

‘Her’ party because it’s not an organisation to develop and
implement new ideas from the smart young to boost the Republic’s economy, lift
millions out of poverty, repair the crumbling infrastructure and raise
education levels.  It’s a vehicle to keep
her family in power. 

Mega has no formal authority.  The PDI-P has the largest number of seats in
the Parliament (109 / 560) but a coalition of opposition parties holds total
control. Despite this she jerks President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo’s strings,
reminding all that the former furniture salesman is just a ‘party worker’ who wouldn’t
have the top job  had it not been for her
imprimatur.

She’s right.  Had she
ignored the overwhelmingly negative surveys and stood herself in last July’s
election as originally planned, Indonesia would now be led by President Prabowo
Subianto.  He’s the scion of a family
with a centuries old lineage, a hard-line former general with a bad human
rights record, and once son-in-law of the nation’s second president, the
dictator Soeharto.

If Mega wasn’t the self-imposed head of the party she
founded last century she’d now be toast. 
Although she was Indonesia’s fifth president between 2001 and 2004 she
inherited the position when President Abdurrahman Wahid was impeached, and did
little more than let the army and her mates run the show.

That was too much like the bad old days for an electorate hungry
for reform; in two later presidential direct vote contests she was soundly rejected
by the people.

Of course this wasn’t her fault, but the ‘treachery’ of
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) who quit her Cabinet over claims of being
sidelined.  For a while he became a media
darling and in 2004 beat his former boss to become the nation’s sixth president.  She’s never forgiven him.

In the villages and crowded kampongs of Java, sun-wrinkled
portraits of first president Soekarno can be found hanging in even the poorest
of homes.  He died 45 years ago but
remains an iconic figure, symbol of the glory of Indonesia’s hard-won independence
from the stubborn colonial Dutch and held in awe by the nostalgic elderly.

Mega believes that she has inherited that aura, even if
betrayal, incompetence, fickle voters and age frustrate her ambitions.  So she’ll nurture the flame until her
children Mohammad Prananda Prabowo, Mohammad Rizki Pramata – and particularly, Puan Maharani, learn how to grasp their destiny. 

Three generations - it's our party and we'll do what we like.  
The Javanese slogan says: 'Don't cut the roots'.


(Mega has been married three times, her father nine.  Her younger sister Rachmawati Soekarnoputri
is a leading member in the opposition Prabowo’s party, Gerindra.)

Addressing the conference, where the 68-year old matriarch
was acclaimed supreme head for a further five years, Mega denounced direct
voting as a Western import.

In the present anti-foreigner climate - aggravated by Tony
Abbott linking 2004 tsunami aid with mercy for drug runners on death row - that’s
the sort of claim that gets delegates on their feet and stamping.  

Everything currently wrong in the resource-rich archipelago
is the fault of sinister others plundering the nation’s wealth, corrupting the
young with evil ideas, and interfering in sovereign legal processes; purge the
outsiders and all will be right.  That’s
what her Dad did in the 1950s and so excavated an even bigger pit of economic
mismanagement.

Mega doesn’t want the Indonesian system where the president is
chosen by the people whatever party he or she represents; that’s populism.

What would suit her is the Australian process.  Under our law voters tick candidates from
parties that have already proclaimed their leaders. Electors might not like the
individual but you approve their party’s policies. 

If our northern neighbour had used that arrangement Mega might
now be President of Indonesia for the second time because her party topped the
polls. 

Instead the man sitting on the edge of the Palace sofas once
comfortably occupied by Mega as a child, is the easy going not over-bright Jokowi,
briefly Governor of Jakarta and before that a likeable small town mayor.  Now he’s floundering, way out of his depth in
the fetid crocodile swamp that passes for Jakarta politics

Jokowi is not part of the feudal Javanese military, business
and semi-regal dynasties that have run the world’s fourth largest nation since
Soekarno proclaimed independence from the colonial Dutch in 1945. That was part
of his appeal.  

Despite getting little campaign help from Megawati, but a
lot from the hopeful young, he won by eight million votes over Prabowo in what
was widely interpreted as the triumph of the little man.

Sadly Jokowi, 53, has proved to be exactly that. If there’s
a statesman’s gene in Jokowi it has yet to become dominant. No one is saying he
has greasy palms, but when given the people’s mandate he fumbled the pass,
dropped it and then lost direction. 

Elected on promises of no more transactional appointments, a
cabinet of altruistic reformers and a massive crack down on corruption, he’s
failed on every pledge.

He also told Cabinet ministers to abandon senior party roles
to concentrate on their jobs. Mega’s daughter Puan, Coordinating Minister for
Human Development and Culture, has ignored her leader. 

Mum made Puan the party head of political and social
affairs, and handpicked 25 others for top tasks saying she’d tested them all –
but only she knew the test.

The PDI-P has another record:  It’s the party with the most members jailed
by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). One serving politician was even
arrested in his hotel at the congress for alleged bribery.  In a news story The Jakarta Post reported ‘the party’s central board is full of
graft-tainted figures and politicians with dubious reputations.’

Again and again the terms ‘trustworthiness’ and ‘loyalty’
were used by Mega when discussing her choice of party officials.  Missing were words like ‘ability’,
‘education’, ‘diligence’ and ‘intelligence’. Jokowi’s demand for selection by
merit went unheeded.  No doubt policies
for the nation’s betterment and improved foreign relations were debated in
depth, but these escaped detection by journalists.

None of this would matter much if there was a viable
opposition with a fresh agenda waiting to take over the shambles.  Prabowo, 63, was widely expected to savage
Jokowi till he became ineffectual, though the President is doing that without
outside help.

However Prabowo has his own problems with two parties in his
coalition ripped asunder by internal leadership challenges.

That’s not an issue in the PDI-P.  If there were any delegates who thought it’s
time to remind that the party calls itself Democratic they are staying
quiet.  When the leader of the world’s
third largest democracy lacks the courage to confront his matron, who else
would dare?

##

 First published in On Line opinion 14 April 2015.  For comments see:

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=17259

Further reading:

Liam Gammon in the ANU's New Mandala:     

http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/newmandala/2015/04/15/what-weve-got-here-is-failure-to-communicate/

New dawn - or democracy’s sunset?                                               

On 20 October Joko Widodo (Jokowi), 53, a commoner from the wrong side of the river, will be installed as Indonesia’s seventh president.

One month ago most commentators were hailing the people’s choice as a bright dawning in the nation’s democratic development, and sunset for the sclerotic graft-ridden oligarchs that have long ruled our closest Asian neighbour.

No longer.

Despite backing by battalions of Generation Net volunteers demanding political and economic reform, and winning by a margin of eight million votes, Jokowi faces a ruthless political guerrilla campaign engineered by his bitter rival Prabowo Subianto.  He’s a former special forces general blacklisted by the US government for alleged human rights abuses.

Prabowo’s contempt for democracy became clear during the dirty campaign which included claims Jokowi was Chinese, communist – even a secret Christian with a conversion agenda, a serious slander in the world’s most populous Islamic nation.

For more than three months Prabowo refused to concede defeat in the 9 July election.  His Gerindra party dashed to the Constitutional Court alleging “massive fraud.”  The court’s nine judges unanimously threw out the claims.

He then mustered a coalition of six opposing parties that hold sway in the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR (People's Representative Council).

The Red and White Coalition, named after the colours of Indonesia’s flag, includes right-wing Muslim parties.  It’s also backed by the Islamic Defenders’ Front, a gang of street thugs specialising in mob violence.

In a 2 am vote taken on September 26 the MPs scrapped direct elections for regional politicians, arguing this would save money. At the time President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), constitutionally bound to stand down after two five-year terms, was in the US.

The New York Times reported the move as a ‘setback for the country’s democratic transition and a naked power grab by its wounded political elite’.  Prabowo returned fire, saying this showed foreigners interfering to make Indonesia a servile state.

Now it’s being alleged that Prabowo plans to use his 353-seat muscle in the 560 member DPR to knock out direct elections for the presidency.  It’s also claimed there are plans to eliminate the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi (KPK) the Anti-Corruption Commission that has been investigating high-profile politicians and businesspeople, scoring several hits. 

If this happens expect Hong Kong style street protests as the young idealists who put Jokowi into the Presidential palace rise against the establishment’s move to drive him out.

Direct elections, the Constitutional Court and the KPK were introduced following the 1998 ousting of General Soeharto, Indonesia’s iron-fisted second president and Prabowo’s former father-in-law, by pro-democracy activists.

Popular voting propelled Jokowi into local government in his Central Java hometown of Solo, then into the position of governor of Jakarta, Indonesia’s sprawling and polluted capital of ten million souls.

Jokowi’s success seemed to show that anyone in Indonesia could reach the top without connections in the military and Jakarta’s sleazy Soeharto-era mafia.

Raised in a rented riverside shack he helped his father gather timber to pay for his education at the prestigious Gadjah Mada University where he graduated with a science degree in forestry.

After working for a government agency in Aceh he returned to Solo and started his own furniture business. Later he became mayor.  In 2012 he was elected Governor of Jakarta where he became popular for his blusukan (walkabout) administration, meeting ordinary folk and listening to their concerns.

This dirt-under-fingernails style, so different from his haughty predecessors, made him a media sweetheart and presidential candidate.

This slum to head of state background, appealing as it seems, has given little protection against a determined cabal of TV tycoons and cashed-up politicians better known, as one Jakarta newspaper reported, for their ‘fractiousness, proclivity for colossal corruption, political dysfunction and unfettered absenteeism than actually getting anything done’.

Indonesia ranks 114 on Transparency International corruption perception index.  NZ tops the list as the world’s least corrupt.

If external hostility wasn’t enough, Jokowi also faces domestic difficulties.  Megawati Soekarnoputri, the petulant daughter of first president Soekarno who was overthrown by Soeharto in a 1965 coup, heads the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (PDIP – the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle) that endorsed Jokowi’s candidature.

Her behaviour since the election has reinforced a widely held view that Jokowi is her puppet relying on her matronage.  She has already snubbed outgoing President SBY’s attempts to discuss Prabowo’s democracy destabilisation, reportedly because she detests the man who defeated her 2004 bid for the presidency.

With unstable backing, a hostile parliament, a vengeful old guard that controls several media outlets, and huge economic problems across an archipelago of 240 million people, Jokowi is going to need extraordinary political skills just to survive, let alone introduce the fairer society he promised.

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