Coalition? Who needs one?

The tallying of votes after Monday's presidential election is close to a conclusion (despite an announcement of the official result being about two weeks away): We already know that none of the candidates has won an outright majority and that there will be a runoff in September between the top two winners.

We know for certain that former top security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has taken one of the slots. The next few days will tell whether the other contender will be the incumbent, Megawati Soekarnoputri, or General (ret) Wiranto.

We also know that both finalists will have to work hard to woo the 40 percent to 50 percent of the vote that went to the other candidates, besides maintaining the votes each gained in Monday's election. Reading the headlines in Indonesian newspapers these past two days, we learn that the winners (or the prospective winner in the case of Megawati and Wiranto) have started exploring the possibility of forming coalitions with the losing candidates or with other political parties ahead of the runoff, to bolster their chances of winning in September.

The candidates and the party leaders seem to be working on the assumption that the losing candidates and their respective parties have some influence over their respective constituents. But if Monday's election result (even the provisional one we had on Thursday morning) is anything to go by, their assumption could not have been more wrong.

One of the most telling results from Monday's election is that many people did not necessarily vote along traditional party lines, or along the lines they had voted on in the legislative elections in April. If that had been the case, Susilo would have won only 7 percent of the vote, as his Democratic Party secured in April, instead of the 30 percent-plus he got on Monday. Wiranto, whose election was officially endorsed by his own Golkar Party and the National Awakening Party (PKB), should have won more than 30 percent of the vote on Monday, but instead won only 20-plus percent.

The way people voted on Monday defied the political power distribution that was reflected in April's election result. This shows that voters were more rational and mature. Instead of blindly casting their votes along traditional party lines or according to the instructions of their party leaders, they assessed each of the presidential candidates on their own merit before making their final decision. We suspect that some of them also voted not for a particular candidate, but against one. And as the provisional results show, many ignored their party leaders' instructions to vote for this or that candidate.

Unfortunately, we cannot say the same about our political elite. Current talk about coalition-forming, and the inevitable "cow-trading" (to use the Indonesian expression for horse- trading), shows that our political leaders have not reached the same rationality and maturity that voters showed on Monday.

Was it not precisely to avoid a repetition of the ugly political bargaining in the aftermath of the 1999 presidential election that the nation decided to employ the direct presidential election system? The whole point of resorting to the direct system was to give people the power to elect their own leaders, instead of entrusting this task to a bunch of opportunist politicians.

Talks by the political elite of forming coalitions ahead of the September runoff will serve only the interests of individual politicians, but not necessarily those of the parties, let alone of their supporters or of the people. Inevitably, the losing candidates will be seeking to use their claim to a share of the April vote to secure something from the finalists -- most probably Cabinet seats.

In forging coalitions, these politicians may have sold their souls and made political compromises that go against their own principles. But they forget that the votes of their supporters are not for sale, and that, as Monday's election has shown, many people did not vote along traditional party lines.

The forging of coalitions with other political parties will certainly be important for whoever wins the September election. They will need the support of other parties to ensure that their legislative agenda is passed in the House of Representatives. But the appropriate time to talk about forming such a coalition is after the September election. For them to start negotiating now suggests political opportunism that will serve only their short- term personal interests. If they are not careful, some of these coalitions may be perceived by their supporters as the making of a pact with the devil. That would be even more harmful to their party's own long-term interests.

The choice is for the politicians to make: Whether or not they wish to continue playing their silly little games of forming coalitions. But they also have to realize that voters have become far more rational, and more mature than the political elite itself.