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."