Better parties vital to Indonesia's democracy

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.