Better parties vital to Indonesia's democracy

Paige Johnson Tan, Ph.D. Candidate in Politics, University of Virginia, USA

I experienced a moment of loss of faith, loss of faith that Indonesia would be successful in its attempt to build a healthy democracy.

The cause of my bad humor? A report in the press that Amien Rais was considering giving up the chairmanship of the Partai Amanat Nasional (PAN) in order to concentrate on his duties as speaker of the MPR. Amien had also encouraged other top state officials -- including the president (PDI-P), vice president (PPP), and Speaker of the House (Golkar) -- to consider doing the same. On its face, this sounds like a good proposal. If everyone could move past their particular party interests, then the country could move forward in the national interest.

For months, we have heard intellectuals and activists making this very case. Scholars have been calling on top state officials to act in accordance with the people's wishes and step down from their party posts to prevent party interest from detracting from officials' duty to the national interest. Once elected to state office, these former party leaders no longer belong just to their own parties; they belong to everyone.

The intellectuals and activists are frustrated with the country's lack of democratic political development since Soeharto's fall. They see many of the same old faces in power. They see many of the same old methods used in politics. They see corruption, floods, lazy legislators, political appeals to communal sentiments, a weak judiciary, violence, a powerful military, the rakyat suffering while the politicians in Jakarta bicker endlessly. Politics seems more a source of the country's problems than a solution to them. Indonesia doesn't need "no parties." It needs "better parties."

Let's assume for a moment that the president, vice president, and the speakers of the two houses of parliament all abandoned their party positions tomorrow to serve the national interest. What would happen? Well, on the first day, everyone would be very happy that the officials had made this grand step.

But, on the second day, when these officials confronted an actual policy issue, politics would return. As much as we would wish it to be so, there is rarely one single national interest to guide state policy (New Order corporatist propaganda to the contrary).

It may seem that parties are an unnatural phenomenon, needlessly sundering the harmony of the political community. The founding fathers of the United States worked mightily to prevent the "evil of faction" (parties) from ensconcing itself on the new country's shores. Within just a few years of the country's establishment, however, parties had begun to entrench themselves. The fact is that parties serve useful purposes, and, thus far, no one has figured out how to operate a modern democracy without them. Peter Mair, a noted Western scholar, observed the importance of parties when he said that not only was the 20th century the century of democracy, it was also the century of "party democracy."

Parties make things easier for elected officials and for citizens. Parties are crucial for representation because voters need parties in order to make sense of the choices presented to them in elections. How will a given individual perform in office? A party label simplifies the choice. How will a voter hold those in government accountable for the policies enacted?

Without parties, voters would not have symbols and packages of policy options from which to choose, and the information costs of political participation would be high (it would be almost too costly in time and effort to find out everything one needed to know to cast a meaningful vote). In the absence of political parties, legislators might be forced to build new coalitions on every issue in order to create laws. Parties also conduct political education, mobilize citizens for participation in the political process, recruit and train leaders for public office, and formulate policy options.

These are just a few examples, and many of them seem highly theoretical in the Indonesian context. Are public officials accountable? Thus far, it does not seem so, but it is only through competitive political parties and avid political participation that they will ever become so.

Many of the problems Indonesia is experiencing are due to her parties. The parties are personalistic and under-programmed (what is the economic policy of any of the top parties?). Throughout the long saga of Gus Dur's impeachment, the parties seemed more keen to machinate and oversee the president than to legislate and solve the country's problems. But the parties are the way they are for concrete reasons stemming from the country's politics, history, socio-religious make-up, and level of economic development.

Trying to wish the parties' problems away by doing away with the parties will not work. The parties have to be made better, through concrete work in party development, through public education, and, admittedly, through a good faith effort on the part of Indonesia's top political power brokers (including the military).

My momentary loss of faith was prompted by Amien Rais' suggesting that he was considering up giving up his chairmanship of PAN in order to devote more of himself to his role as Assembly Speaker. The suggestion that Amien is considering this move does not mean that he is proposing to wipe out the political parties, but it does weaken the legitimacy of the parties' position in an important way.

He would be saying, as Sukarno did: I am above the partisan fray. I see only the national interest. Parties are bad. With his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago in the United States, Amien likely knows that this move would dent the legitimacy of the parties in Indonesia. And that's bad for democracy in the long run.

Indonesia is not monolithic. To pretend that it is, is fantasy. Indonesians have different interests. Some want more Islam in state policy, some want less. Some favor an economic policy of the right, some the left. There is only one thing you can try to get all Indonesians to agree on and that is that democracy is a process for trying to resolve all those competing interests. And in that process, better parties have a vital role to play.