How critical is the role of the vice presidency?
By Pandaya
JAKARTA (JP): The raging debate on who will become the republic's next vice president has died down since all of the five political factions that make up the 1,000-strong People's Consultative Assembly picked B.J. Habibie as their sole candidate.
Although the presidential and vice presidential elections do not formally kick off for another week, every informed Indonesian has in their minds that the next president will be Soeharto and the vice president Habibie.
Now that the main agenda -- the presidential and vice presidential elections -- has been all-but sealed, the ongoing Assembly convention that will eat up almost Rp 45 billion ($5 million) in taxpayers' money will be largely 11 days of gavel- banging formality, as critics put it.
The mounting calls for political reform will be overlooked and the State Policy Guidelines enacted without significant changes.
Thousands of intellectuals and informal leaders' call for the Assembly to consider Emil Salim, a former environment minister acclaimed for his integrity, as an alternative vice-presidential candidate will most likely be consigned to the dustbin of history.
An underlying issue is how indispensable is the vice presidency in the coming five years when the economy is on the verge of calamity and the government faces declining credibility.
Never before has the selection of a vice president sparked as thick a cloud of controversy as it has now, especially since Soeharto, who has been in power for 32 years, turns 77 this year.
Besides getting on in years, the President's health has been of particular concern although it has appeared robust since he canceled, on his doctors' advice, his attendance at an ASEAN summit in Kuala Lumpur last December and took a two-week rest.
Given his age, many see Soeharto's next term as a critical time and that the vice presidency may no longer be such a largely ceremonial post. Five years ago this was the argument that people used to describe what they hoped would be the strategic role of then vice president-elect Try Sutrisno.
Five years ago, some people hoped the expected strategic role would stop the criticism that the vice president is a mere "spare tire" in Indonesian politics, someone who is there to take over the president's job in case the latter is absent or becomes incapacitated.
Favor
Even though there has never been any formal declaration of preference, it is clear that Soeharto favors Habibie, the outgoing state minister of research and technology, as his running mate.
Chairman of the influential Association of Indonesian Moslem Intellectuals (ICMI) and the German-educated technology czar is Soeharto's long-time confidant.
Until the dominant political party Golkar announced it was fielding Habibie as its vice presidential candidate, many people believed Soeharto would pick a figure with a military background as his next deputy.
They had assumed, wrongly, that Soeharto would need a military man so that if anything happened to him, the Armed Forces (ABRI) would retain its domination of the political arena.
When Soeharto accepted Gen. (ret) Try Sutrisno as his deputy in 1993, speculation abounded that the President might step down mid-term, which also proved wrong. Now, the speculation is no longer even being heard.
Despite rumors that some people in ABRI want to see the next vice president as someone with a military background, former ABRI commander Gen. Feisal Tanjung has affirmed the military's support for Habibie.
The choice of Habibie is to show that ABRI, too, is committed to promoting democracy, Feisal argued.
Indria Samego of the National Institute of Sciences says the question of who the next vice president is, remains a critical issue given Soeharto's age and the global challenges facing Indonesia.
"As we enter the 21st century, the country needs a national leader who has a good reputation both at home and in the international arena," he told The Jakarta Post.
And for Indria, who is also a researcher at ICMI's Center for Information and Development Studies (CIDES), Habibie is the standard bearer and best choice for the vice presidency.
Habibie, he says, is an acceptable figure for all spectrums in society and therefore, if anything happens to the President, the transition of power (to Habibie) would be without bloodshed.
The immediate challenge that the next national leadership team will have to handle is to end the economic crisis. The markets are watching closely to gauge how the coming leadership team might restore both local and international confidence in the Indonesian economy.
Pessimists are worried that the election of Habibie, whose economic vision is called "unorthodox" by foreign media, would not restore global confidence in Indonesia.
A day after Golkar hinted its choice of Habibie in January, the rupiah crashed to a then all-time low of 12,000 against the U.S. dollar. This argument, however, has been rejected by Habibie's supporters, including some CIDES researchers.
Government critic Amien Rais says that since Soeharto and Habibie's elections are foregone conclusions, they should be given about six months before the public and the Assembly should be allowed to pass judgment on them.
"Then we'll figure out the next step to take," says Amien, who leads the 28-million-strong Muhammadiyah, a "reformist" educational Moslem organization.