Coalition? Who needs one?

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.