District electoral system is ideal for RI: Scholar
District electoral system is ideal for RI: Scholar
JAKARTA (JP): Ideal democracy in Indonesia can be achieved
only when the people themselves elect candidates to the House of
Representatives, instead of having them appointed through a
proportional system, a noted political scientist said yesterday.
Mochtar Pabottingi, a scholar of the Indonesian Institute of
Sciences, told members of Commission X of the House during a
hearing yesterday that the district system, in which voters
directly nominate their candidates, is most appropriate for
Indonesia because of the geographic spread of voters.
"Through this system, the representatives are elected from
those who can really air the people's aspirations," Mochtar said.
He warned that changing the election system would not have any
impact on Indonesia's political condition unless the nation is
thoroughly prepared.
The government should not force itself to change the electoral
system, he said, adding that it was most important that the
implementation of the existing system be improved.
"The reason is very simple," he said. "It may not be the
system which is wrong, but the implementation."
He also warned that any mistake made in changing the system
could fatally affect the country's political life and discredit
the government.
Mochtar, who heads the institute's Center for Political
Studies, has been appointed as chairman of a team specially set
up to study the current electoral system.
Study
President Soeharto commissioned the institute in February to
study the possibility of changing the election system from the
current proportional representation, to a first-past-the-post
system.
The Army has also undertaken a similar study and its
provisional result, announced in June, determined that there was
no need for Indonesia to move away from the proportional
representative electoral system.
Under the current system, voters elect one of three political
parties -- Golkar, the United Development Party, or the
Indonesian Democratic Party. The 400 seats in the House are then
distributed to the three parties according to their shares of the
votes. The parties then appointed their representatives.
Mochtar stressed that it is the people's perception of how
democracy is implemented that really counts, rather than what
system is being adopted.
As part of the current project, the institute has launched a
survey in 15 provinces, which includes looking at how past
general elections were conducted there and on the political views
of the people in those provinces. The institute has also studied
the electoral systems used in other countries.
Mochtar said the people's growing demand for democracy and
freedom of expression, and the expansion of Indonesia's middle
class, are living examples of stable political changes taking
place in the country.
"We have finished the first part of the study and we hope we
can finish it entirely in December. It is the President who will
later decide whether to announce the results of the study,"
Mochtar added. (05)