Euphoria of number

Euphoria of number

The Team of Eleven, the verification committee tasked with
determining the eligibility of poll contestants, did not surprise
anyone on Thursday when it announced the 48 political parties
meeting all criteria to contest the June general election.

This fails to surprise us because the nation knows that, since
president Soeharto's downfall in May, busy politicians have
established more than 100 parties to contest the June general
election. At least 24 of these parties, calling themselves either
national or Islamic parties, are sponsored by Muslim social
organizations.

At a glance this mass movement seems counterproductive to
national development, as it is seemingly based solely on
political egotism and a mad grab for power. This provokes the
question: How can a nation which prides itself on the virtue of
musyawarah (deliberation leading to consensus) produce so many
leaders who shun this noble wisdom?

But further analysis unearths other explanations.

The present situation can be likened to the trauma of the
1950s, when established political entities were dismembered by
their own ambitious reactionaries. Perhaps now politicians are
opting to work separately from the beginning to avoid bitter
separations in the future.

However, the most logical explanation is perhaps simply the
desire to enjoy the newly found political freedom following the
fall of the dictator.

But politicians, as seasonal as some of them are, have to bear
in mind that desire alone is not enough, because a general
election is not a Latin American carnival. The voters, especially
the more educated among them, need to learn whether the parties'
agendas are good enough to salvage this nation from the present
political and economic morass.

As of Thursday, only the National Mandate Party and the
Justice Party had announced their respective political agendas in
detail.

Although many parties have claimed they will each win about 40
percent of the vote, deep in their hearts they must know it will
be a difficult contest. So there have been talks about the
sharing of power, because some of the more astute politicians
have realized that they have been living under the delusion of
having tens of millions of supporters.

In the planned power-sharing system, a party receiving more
than 40 percent of vote will be free to select its partner, or
partners; those with about 30 percent each would negotiate a
partnership on an equal basis; and those with less votes would be
begging to join a coalition.

But this kind of partnership may turn out to repeat history,
although more foolish than what happened in the 1950s, because
once the partnership is dissolved the government will fall. And
this would lead to further political instability.

It is true that in our political wilderness there are still
politicians roaming the provinces unknown to their electorates.
They are products of Soeharto's concept of the "floating mass",
in which the government prohibited village level political
representation. These leaders visit the populace once in five
years to feed them with empty promises, exploiting the honesty of
our rural people. But they might also win millions of votes.

It is certainly hard to pick who will emerge as the biggest
political entity, as it is not clear which of the political
leaders is fit to head the nation for the next five years.

However, most thinking citizens today agree that any
politician who has served in the Soeharto regime should be barred
from leading the country. They know that the general election
will only have meaning if it can point this country toward a new
era and leave behind the nightmare of the status quo.