Megawati has supporters

Megawati has supporters

I read with interest Sungkowo Sokawera's letter Who supports
Megawati, published in The Jakarta post on Aug. 6, 1999. The
question he posed was which people really supported Megawati? He
is of the opinion that the 200 seats for the Indonesian
Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) in the People's
Consultative Assembly (MPR) are insignificant compared to the 700
seats available in that legislature. Also the number of
38,089,077 people who voted for PDI Perjuangan in the June
general election is still less than the total number of people
living below the poverty line, which was put at 49.5 million at
the end of 1998.

By asking "Who supports Megawati", Mr. Sungkowo implies that
Megawati has virtually no supporters in Indonesia considering
that the whole population is a little over 206 million.

My question to Mr. Sungkowo is: "Are you happy to see that the
fourth president is Habibie who was nominated by the Golkar party
which is second in rank in terms of votes collected after PDI
Perjuangan? Or is it fair if Amien Rais is unexpectedly elected
president? More extreme still, do you wish that a man out of the
blue is elected to be the next president? Are these people with
smaller number of supporters much better than Megawati?

I would like to say that whoever is elected to be the future
president is most welcome by me. But more so if the president
elect is from the party which was victorious in the June
elections.

WISNU W.

Denpasar, Bali