Democracy wins in Indonesian election

Democracy wins in Indonesian election

The results are not all in from last week's Indonesian election, but however the seats in parliament are finally allocated, the poll is a big win for the democratic process. With 140 million eligible voters and about 450,000 candidates in the national and provincial polls, the fact the election went off so smoothly is a good result.

Indonesians do not have a great deal of experience with contested polls. While the last election was held in 1999, the one before that took place in the middle 1950s. Although some parties are demanding recounts, there does not appear to be any pattern of wholesale corruption across the country. And for an electorate not all that familiar with the democratic process, the Indonesian people behaved like any other -- they gave a sluggish government a hiding. It appears support for President Megawati Soekarnoputri's Indonesian Party of Struggle collapsed from a third of the national vote in 1999 to just on 20 percent this time. This is an ominous result for Ms Megawati, who faces a presidential poll in July. The President paid the price for her failure to improve a stagnant economy that leaves Indonesians with an average annual income of under $1000 a year and in which corruption is endemic.

But while the voters have lost faith in Ms Megawati, they are clearly committed to the ideals of representative democracy and social tolerance. Although Indonesia is the world's largest Muslim nation, its voters have not supported politicians tied to Islamic fundamentalism who would have the country governed according to extremist interpretations of the Koran. Certainly, the religion-focused Prosperous Justice Party polled sixth, with just under 7 percent of the votes. But it ran on policies of anti-corruption and education, rather than religion. This result reflects last month's election outcome in predominantly Muslim Malaysia, where the new Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi, promised to end the corruption associated with the regime of his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad. Mr Abdullah received the mandate that Ms Megawati was denied, winning a huge parliamentary majority and taking back one of the two, out of 13, states previously governed by an extreme Islamicist party. That the Malaysian, and now the Indonesian, peoples have voted for economic growth rather than religious rule demonstrates why Islamic terrorists fear democracy -- they know their cause does not attract the voters.

-- The Australian, Sydney