Campaigns should be more educational

Campaigns should be more educational

This year's election campaign is basked in new restrictions
and new techniques, such as "dialog campaigns". J. Soedjati
Djiwandono from the Center for Strategic and International
Studies muses over the essence of the general election.

JAKARTA (JP): An election is still primarily an exercise in
practicing democracy for a majority of people in developing
countries like Indonesia.

While electoral campaigns are aimed at winning as many votes
as possible, especially among "floating votes", they should be
educational as well. We have been witnessing recently, however,
that election campaigns are increasingly becoming less
educational.

One cannot blame political parties alone, which are themselves
in need of sophistication and experience in the art of modern
democracy. The government's limitations on mass mobilization by
contesting parties are understandable in light of violent social
and political instability over the past year or so.

But the ban on criticism against government policies during
the campaign on one hand, and methods of campaigning advocated by
the government on the other, tend to almost render the whole
exercise meaningless.

The so-called "dialog campaigns", particularly on radio and
television, sound and look like they are staged, in which
questions from members of an apparently selected audience are, at
best, answered with empty cliches, if not ignored altogether.

Most mass rallies appear like narcissist exercises by
political parties meeting their own members, supporters and well-
wishers.

Fiery speeches delivered were thus "preaching to the choir",
interspersed with tumultuous yells and shouts of empty slogans,
perhaps for lack of anything meaningful to say. And rowdy
motorcades that often follow tend to frighten away many of those
that might otherwise be supporters. Interestingly, the government
itself has coined the term "festival of democracy" to refer to
the general election.

The most ironical part of it all is the practice of political
parties offering "programs" (platforms) without any idea on how
to carry them out or who they will nominate as candidates to lead
the government in accomplishing them.

One of the most important decisions to be made by the People's
Consultative Assembly (MPR) after the election will be on the
broad lines of state policy. This mandate will be entrusted to
the newly elected President to carry out as set forth by MPR.

However, the present regime set a precedent after the first
election in 1971, which exactly reversed the process. At least
this was the practice until the third general election, whereby
the President submitted to the new MPR his own draft of state
policy, as an annex to his speech at the swearing-in ceremony of
new members of the House of Representatives (DPR) and MPR.

The draft had been prepared by a team of his own creation
according to a recently launched book by former vice president
Sudharmono, Pengalaman Dalam Masa Pengabdian: Sebuah Otobiografi
(Experiences in the Period of Service: An Autobiography, 1997,
pp.236-7,276,284), later decreed by the new MPR.

The President seemed to have assumed on those occasions that
he would be reelected when the new MPR convened its general
session. Whatever the case may be, the process, which may well
have been continued since then, has turned the constitutional
provision on that particular matter upside-down.

Hence the importance of nominating presidential candidates by
political parties during the campaign period, so that the
President would, in effect, be directly elected by the people.
And here, as in many other aspects of our political system, lies
the importance of political reform.

To be sure, democratization is a long, never-ending process
with its ups and downs. But despite a series of elections, little
substantive progress has been made and little effort to help
speed it up. On the contrary, we have been experiencing setbacks,
especially since the introduction of a special screening for
legislative candidates and increasing limitations on the conduct
of election campaigns.

Vested interest in the perpetuation and concentration of
power, with all its dire implications, may be the deeper cause.
Over a century ago, British historian John Emerich Edward
Dalberg-Acton, later Lord Acton (1834-1902), gave a warning
against the danger of such a tendency: "All power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."