by ADITYA SYED
The campaign began last month for Indonesia’s presidential and general elections due to be held on February 14 next year. Due to the country’s highly restrictive electoral system, just three presidential candidates and their vice-presidential running mates will face off in the first round. All three are conservative figures of the Indonesian political establishment, defenders of capitalism and, despite their populist electoral rhetoric, innately hostile to the interests of working people. After serving two five-year terms, the current president, Joko Widodo, is ineligible to stand.
The anti-democratic electoral laws ensure that only a handful of people can hope to stand as presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Each pair of candidates must be able to demonstrate that they have the support of political parties holding at least 20 percent of the seats in the national parliament or People’s Representative Council (DPR), or 25 percent of the total votes in the previous election. The requirement effectively restricts the maximum number of candidates to three, possibly four.
Moreover, the political parties represented in the DPR are themselves subject to restrictions. The threshold for a party to gain DRP seats is currently 4 percent of the national vote—a benchmark that only nine parties succeeded in reaching at the 2019 election. Regionally based parties that might poll strongly in a particular area are virtually excluded from the national parliament.
This anti-democratic system, set up in the wake of the fall of the blood-soaked Suharto dictatorship in 1998, has been a major obstacle to the emergence of new political parties, thus maintaining the monopoly of those political parties that were permitted to legally function under Suharto. He came to power in the 1965-66 CIA-backed coup that slaughtered up to a million workers, peasants and communist party members. Any socialist, communist or even left-leaning political parties or candidates face prosecution under Suharto’s 1966 law banning communism that has been maintained by subsequent administrations.
While the fall of Suharto was accompanied by profuse promises of democratic reform, the state apparatus of the dictatorship remains largely intact. That is epitomised by the presidential candidate who is currently leading in the polls—Prabowo Subianto. A former army lieutenant general, Prabowo served as a commander in the notorious Kopassus special forces and was centrally implicated in the brutal operations against the East Timorese independence movement. At the time of the mass anti-Suharto protests in 1998, he was head of the Army Strategic Reserve Command or Kostrad, and was involved in the kidnapping and torture of student leaders.
The anti-democratic electoral laws ensure that only a handful of people can hope to stand as presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Each pair of candidates must be able to demonstrate that they have the support of political parties holding at least 20 percent of the seats in the national parliament or People’s Representative Council (DPR), or 25 percent of the total votes in the previous election. The requirement effectively restricts the maximum number of candidates to three, possibly four.
Moreover, the political parties represented in the DPR are themselves subject to restrictions. The threshold for a party to gain DRP seats is currently 4 percent of the national vote—a benchmark that only nine parties succeeded in reaching at the 2019 election. Regionally based parties that might poll strongly in a particular area are virtually excluded from the national parliament.
This anti-democratic system, set up in the wake of the fall of the blood-soaked Suharto dictatorship in 1998, has been a major obstacle to the emergence of new political parties, thus maintaining the monopoly of those political parties that were permitted to legally function under Suharto. He came to power in the 1965-66 CIA-backed coup that slaughtered up to a million workers, peasants and communist party members. Any socialist, communist or even left-leaning political parties or candidates face prosecution under Suharto’s 1966 law banning communism that has been maintained by subsequent administrations.
While the fall of Suharto was accompanied by profuse promises of democratic reform, the state apparatus of the dictatorship remains largely intact. That is epitomised by the presidential candidate who is currently leading in the polls—Prabowo Subianto. A former army lieutenant general, Prabowo served as a commander in the notorious Kopassus special forces and was centrally implicated in the brutal operations against the East Timorese independence movement. At the time of the mass anti-Suharto protests in 1998, he was head of the Army Strategic Reserve Command or Kostrad, and was involved in the kidnapping and torture of student leaders.
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