Elections law has no basis to end status quo

Elections law has no basis to end status quo

Satya Arinanto, Lecturer, Faculty of Law University of Indonesia,
Jakarta, arinanto@cbn.net.id

After a long debate, the House of Representatives and the
government finally passed the elections law into effect on Feb.
18. Previously, at the end of 2002, the House and the government
had passed Law No. 31/2002 on political parties.

However, we still have to wait for at least three other bills
-- those on the election of the president and vice president, on
the structure and the status of the People's Consultative
Assembly and the national and local legislative bodies, and the
bill of the constitutional court.

And we also still have to wait for around more than 100
regulations which need to be issued by the General Elections
Commission.

Since the New Order era, the pro-democracy movement has been
increasingly calling for genuinely free and fair elections. As
observed by Anders Uhlin in his book Indonesia and the 'third
wave of democratization': The Indonesian pro-democracy movement
in a changing world (1997), there may be disagreement on the
advantages and disadvantages of the various forms of electoral
system and the ideal number of political parties, but there is
general agreement that Golkar's dominant position, and state and
military intervention in elections must come to an end.

The New Order elections are now seen as meaningless events
which only served to provide some legitimacy for the
authoritarian regime. According to Uhlin, as long as independent
opposition parties and candidates cannot compete on equal terms,
election fraud continues to be widespread and the legislature
powerless, most pro-democracy actors would support an election
boycott.

One of the most crucial issues in the drafting of the
elections law is which electoral system will be used in the 2004
general election?

According to Gary W. Cox in his book Making Votes Count:
Strategic coordination in the world's electoral systems (1997),
several general features of electoral coordination illustrate,
among other things, the mixture of common and opposed interests;
the possibility of success or failure: and the rapidity with
which vote intentions change when coordination takes off. The
examples' focus on strategic voting in presidential elections is
too limited, however.

Moreover, Cox stated that modern representative democracy
presents at its core a series of coordination problems that arise
as natural consequences of electoral competition for governmental
offices. A group with enough votes to elect a particular number
of candidates in a given (legislative or executive) race will
elect those candidates only if it can make its votes count by
concentrating them appropriately.

One way to avoid spreading votes too thinly is to limit the
number of candidates. But which potential candidates,
representing what shades of opinion will withdraw in favor of
which others? Which candidates will bear the brunt of strategic
voting and which will be its beneficiaries?

The new elections law governs such matters as general
provisions; participants; the right to vote; the organizing
committee; the district and the number of representatives; the
nomination process; the campaign procedures; the voting and
counting; and the determination of the election result.

Also provide for is the recall of elected candidates;
supervision, law enforcement, and monitoring; criminal sanctions;
transitory provisions; and concluding provisions.

The lawmakers agreed to choose the "limited" open proportional
system, a system supported primarily by the two major political
parties, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI
Perjuangan) and Golkar.

Problems after the passing of the law are expected. One is the
plan by some political parties to seek a judicial review from the
Supreme Court. Based on the Fourth Amendment to the 1945
Constitution and Supreme Court Practice Direction No. 2/2002, the
Supreme Court is to function temporarily as a constitutional
court until Aug. 17, 2003. One of the constitutional court's
functions is to undertake judicial reviews.

The political parties that are unhappy with the new elections
law also think that it will only benefit the big political
parties, especially the PDI Perjuangan and Golkar. But in all
events, Golkar will benefit more than the PDI Perjuangan.

For example, the law does not forbid a defendant in court
proceedings from being nominated as a legislator. It also enables
public officials to actively participate in election campaigns.
Many observers believe that these two articles are the result of
horse trading between the two major political parties.

So despite the hopes raised by the recognition of the open
list system, at least in the near future we are not likely to see
high quality democracy, especially during the 2004 general
elections. And the election outcome will probably continue to
maintain the status quo in Indonesian politics.