RI ELECTION. DEBATE 1

 When sinking looms, jump.

Imagine if almost six per cent of the Coalition reckoned they’d lose their seats at the next election so switch to Labor. 

Chances are they wouldn’t be piped aboard, as ship jumpers are not favoured in Australian politics, distrusted by the party they betrayed and the one where they seek to stowaway.

Not so in Indonesia where more than 30 in the 560-member House of Representatives (DPR) have sniffed the wind and reckon they’d rather jettison principles than lose prestige.  That’s according to Jakarta think-tank the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Parties need at least four percent of the national vote to stay afloat in the DPR so members of small shows, often faith-based, have been checking lockers for lifejackets.

Why so keen to hang-in? Politicians everywhere say they’re motivated by wanting to ‘serve the community’. The truer phrase in Indonesia would be ‘take from the community.’  Transparency International claims the law makers work in the Republic’s most corrupt public institution.

In the last 15 years the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has secured convictions against almost 550 public servants and politicians. It remains the most trusted public authority so subject to attacks by its victims for being ’too powerful’.

Seventeen is a mystic number in Indonesian culture; 17 August 1945 was the date the nation declared its independence from the colonial Dutch, so it was appropriate that the first of five national TV debates ahead of the 17 April national vote was held on 17 January.

This pitted President Joko Widodo, 57, and his running mate hardline Islamic cleric Ma’ruf Amin, 75, against Prabowo Subianto, 67, and US-educated businessman Sandiaga Uno, 49.

Widodo, who has held power for the past five years, heads a coalition of seven parties, led by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP). Together they hold 386 seats.  Election of the President is by direct popular vote and doesn’t depend on numbers in the DPR.

With three months before the ballot, the incumbent is leading most opinion polls.   But in this vast and complex nation straddling the Equator, one spark from an inflammatory issue (price of basic commodities, overseas ‘interference’ or religious slur) could start a bushfire turning predictions to ash.

Opposition is the Red and White Coalition (named after the bicolour national flag), with 113 seats.  It’s just two parties led by Gerindra started by Subianto as a vehicle for his bid to remain relevant.

He’s a yesteryear’s warrior hoping to remove Widodo in a contest that deserves close attention, particularly by Australians concerned our foreign policy should be more Jakarta and less Washington

Billed as big, a splendid example of doing politics properly in the world’s third largest democracy, the debate disappointed largely because it wasn’t.  That’s because the General Election Commission (KPU) determined the issues – law, human rights, terrorism and conflict – and gave questions in advance.

Predictably answers were memorised ensuring speakers drove past each other staring ahead; they seldom crossed the median strip threatening a collision of policies which might spark chatter.

Post-event interviews of viewers found many rated the show boring, failing to offer new initiatives to handle old problems.  Some said they dozed off.

Subianto revealed his sclerotic thinking by continually urging ‘strong’ boundaries, laws and responses to crises, wrapping himself in knots (and nots) when Widodo asked about the endorsement of six candidates who’d already been convicted of corruption.

Suggesting it’s up to the electorate to reject them, wasn’t the best response from a man with the power to sift applicants.

For Western viewers Uno appeared the most professional, attacking Widodo on his record and asking why voters should continue trusting his government.  This should have given the President the chance to launch a job-done list.  He blew it.

The challenger’s backers remind voters their hero is properly titled Lieutenant General (retired).  They think electors still hanker for a return to the tough-guy politics which kept Subianto’s former father-in-law Soeharto in power for 32 years last century.

Indonesia’s median age is 30 (Australia’s is 37); the world’s most populous Muslim nation (88 per cent of 260 million), is largely young.  Around 30 per cent were born since Soeharto quit in 1998 after student riots against his economic and conservative social policies, so talk of the Good-ol’-Days means nothing unless it’s a game or smartphone app.

Although a grandfather, calm low-key Widodo looks young, cool and modern, unlike the arrogant Subianto, often astride a horse and wearing dark glasses. His style is fascist aloof. 

Subianto told viewers that raising public officials’ salaries would hasten the defeat of corruption.  However most convicted of bribery were holding top jobs with good pay when arrested. 

Former Golkar Party leader Setya Novanto, once a super-rich wheeler, is now serving a 15-year term involving a AUD $240 million electronic ID card fraud. The lower rungs tend to have higher morals.

Widodo’s offsider Amin is a former head of the world’s largest Sunni Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama claiming 40 million members.  He’s more used to addressing compliant congregations so put in a poor performance, even failing to find anything to say when offered time to summarise.

Why bother to persuade when you can order?  Indonesia’s Human Rights watch has reminded voters that Amin has ‘helped draft and been a vocal supporter of fatwas (religious edicts),

‘Those fatwas, although not legally binding, have been used to legitimise increasingly hateful rhetoric against LGBT people and in some cases, fuelled deadly violence by militant Islamists against religious minorities.’

Sadly these issues stir few voters; the candidates know this well so just give tick-a-box replies on HR and move on to other concerns – food security, energy and natural resources.  All on the agenda for debate two next month. On the 17^th, of course.

Australian journalist Duncan Graham lives in East Java.

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 First published in Pearls and Irritaations, 21 January 2019.  See:
http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-when-sinking-looms-jump/

A CANDIDATE LACKING GRAVITAS

The Right Stuff for Captain Indonesia?                                        

Indonesia’s electoral system differs from Australia’s. Presidential hopefuls didn’t seek Legislative Assembly (DPR) seats at the 9 April election - they’ll be facing the people in a direct vote on 9 July. However their parties’ performances are a useful weather vane. Duncan Graham writes from East Java:

There was something unsettling about presidential aspirant Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo’s performance on Metro TV last week.

The Jakarta Governor looked tired but good naturedly deflected questions about a vice presidential partner following the DPR elections.  The unofficial ‘quick count’ results have given his Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), prime position at just under 19 per cent, though way below predictions.

Also on the talk show were former vice president and business tycoon Jusuf Kalla, Minister for State Owned Enterprises and major newspaper chain owner Dahlan Iskan, and Jakarta deputy governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (Ahok), a political rival.

Earlier there’d been a one-sided embrace between Surya Paloh, the owner of Metro TV and head of the National Democratic Party (NasDem), and a squirming Jokowi; it looked like a white pointer nuzzling a seal.

Powerful men all and keen to ride pillion on Jokowi’s bike, but this was a sideshow.  Absent were the two giants who want the top job.  (The current incumbent, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, known as SBY, has served two five-year terms and is constitutionally barred from standing.)

Apart from Jokowi the major contestants are Aburizal Bakrie, corporate tsar and head of Golkar, which ran second with 14.4 per cent, and former general Prabowo Subianto, who heads Gerindra. This came third with 11.9 per cent.  

Both men are zillionaires, relics of the 32-year Soeharto era of crony capitalism and authoritarian control, desperate to get into the Presidential palace.   

In the next three months Jokowi, who owned a small-town furniture factory, not a media conglomerate in the capital, will be going head-to-head with candidates who don’t have ‘lose’ in their lexicons.

These men radiate power at Strontium 90 levels. Should either win the move would be horizontal, just stepping out of one grand office into another. The new uniform would fit their stout forms without tailoring.

When slim Jokowi left Metro’s studio for another function, he walked alone through the audience; just an ordinary bloke, not an Alpha male who expects quaking respect as his right.

All fine and egalitarian. But absent was the gravitas, any hint he has the Right Stuff.

Being the battlers’ mate with his meet-the-people blusukan walkabouts as Governor of the nation’s capital for the past 18 months has given Jokowi profile, but those days are surely over.   Despite having ‘democracy’ in its title the PDI-P is the fiefdom of first president Soekarno’s daughter Megawati. Now Jokowi must break free from her matronage, to move on. That means up and away.

In 2006 Bakrie was faced with overwhelming expert evidence that his company’s East Java gas well had caused the world’s biggest mud volcano, displacing 40,000 citizens.

Then other geologists arrived who blamed natural causes. And the courts agreed. 

When outraged victims marched to Jakarta demanding compensation their outspoken leader suddenly appeared on a Bakrie TV station, tearfully withdrawing his statements and apologising for insulting the big man’s family.

In 2010 the Bakrie Group went into a coal deal with prominent London financier Nat Rothschild. The partnership soured, both sides lost but the Bakries appear to have bested the British financial establishment.

Prabowo, once Soeharto’s son-in-law has an impeccable born-to-rule pedigree; his grandfather played a key role in establishing the nation, and his father was a leading economist.

As a Kopassus commander Prabowo fought in East Timor and later led a hostage rescue operation in Papua. If his vaulting ambition hadn’t over-leaped during the 1998 fall of Soeharto he’d probably be considered a national hero.

After being discharged from the military for ‘misinterpreting orders’ regarding the alleged kidnapping and torture of activists he fled to exile in Jordan.

 He returned later and got into business – then politics.  He was Megawati’s running partner in the 2009 election. When that bid failed he started Gerindra (Great Indonesia Movement) which he runs in the style of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Prabowo has been blacklisted by the US for alleged human rights abuses, but who cares?  Not the Gerindra voters in the DPR election who reckon the nation of 240 million needs Captain Indonesia to keep control.

Though few articulate their concerns out loud, the concern is that Jokowi won’t last the distance, that his campaign could falter in a real or contrived crisis requiring a tough guy to ‘rescue’ democracy.

The 9 April election went brilliantly, though the Golput (no show) response was worryingly high at an estimated 34 per cent abstainers. The campaign was mainly benign, more often marked by humour than venom. But that wasn’t the grand event.

Security has been boosted at Megawati’s insistence, but Jokowi still seems reluctant to abandon the accessibility that’s taken him so far.

First president Soekarno survived assassination attempts. He was also hugely popular with the people, but lost power when a failed coup d’état let the army take over.  

During the 1999 East Timor crisis the military used its standard blacks-ops tactic of arming ‘ninja’ militias to sow discord when third president Habibie had already agreed to a referendum.

Fourth president Gus Dur was ignored when he ordered Islamic militants to be stopped from sailing to the Moluccas where sectarian violence took the lives of 5,000. These three presidents were civilians.  Second president Soeharto and current president SBY were generals.

The Australian Defence Forces may not like its government’s asylum seeker turn-back policies, but no-one expects Tony Abbott’s orders to be disobeyed or his position slandered.

But this is Indonesia where the army has always seen its role differently, the protector of the nation’s sacred Unitary State principle from internal threats. That trumps the people’s will every time.

What authority could Jokowi, who has literally and metaphorically never worn camouflage, exercise over an army that does things its way?  Goodness, the man’s religious credentials are also in question: He’s reputed to be an abangan (nominal Muslim), and a pluralist.

Even if no-one primes a bomb or engineers sectarian strife, Jokowi can be neutered by relentless attacks highlighting his deficiencies while promoting his opponents’ proven merits There’ll be no lack of money – or will.

Many Indonesians, including SBY, openly believe in black magic. Expect a dark campaign with battalions of phantoms.

(First published 23 April 2014 in Our Indonesia Today.  I forget to include it on this blog at the time - but it's sadly looking a mite prophetic.)