Megawati may be able to remain president until 2009

R. William Liddle, Political Scientist, The Ohio State University

In Jakarta in July of this year I interviewed several high level party leaders and parliamentarians from each of the major parties. In the course of my conversations with leaders of Golkar, National Awakening Party (PKB), and United Development Party (PPP) -- respectively the second, third, and fourth largest parties after President Megawati Soekarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) -- I was shocked to discover that they all assumed that Megawati will be elected president in the first direct presidential election, scheduled for 2004.

As though rehearsing their arguments to Megawati, each tried to convince me that his party offered PDI Perjuangan the best alliance, in the sense of a vice-presidential pairing that would add most to Megawati's vote total. Except for the two-party alliance aspect, it all sounded very American.

Who the vice-presidential candidates might be, as individuals, is a critical question, but was far less clear from my interviews. Only PPP seems to have a leader, the current Vice- President Hamzah Haz, who is an obvious choice, more or less fully supported by his party. Akbar Tandjung appears to remain the favorite of Golkar leaders, but because of his court conviction on charges of corruption there is virtually no chance that Megawati will choose him. Jusuf Kalla, the coordinating minister for social affairs, the hero of the recent Malino agreements which brought at least a temporary reduction in ethnic violence in Poso and Maluku, is popular with some Jakarta intellectuals, who think that he adds a pious Muslim and eastern Indonesian, if not more generally Outer Island, balance to the Javanese/Balinese religious syncretist Megawati. But he has, so far at least, little support from Golkar apparatchiks.

Former President Abdurrahman Wahid, as of now PKB's formal candidate for president in 2004, is the only leader of genuinely national stature in PKB. He is unacceptable as a vice- presidential candidate on a Megawati ticket because he is a failed president. The second most prominent PKB leader, Matori Abdul Jalil, the current Minister of Defense, has been ostracized by the party for failing to support Abdurrahman in the critical final stages of his presidency.

Why do the leaders of Golkar, PKB, and PPP all assume that Megawati will be the victorious presidential candidate? Because of the nature of my visit (I was conducting an evaluation for the National Democratic Institute, and was limited in my interviews to a set of questions about internal party development) I was unable to ask them. This frees me to speculate on what their answers might have been. I will offer six.

First, they would have told me that they can count. PDI Perjuangan won a large plurality (34 percent) in 1999, much larger than any other party received in the first democratic election in 1955, when PDI Perjuangan predecessor PNI was the largest party with 22 percent. It thus starts out stronger than any other party, certainly stronger than the second largest party, Golkar (22 percent), which appears to many still to represent the past and whose national level leadership is weak and divided.

Second, they are aware that PDI-P monopolizes the "nationalist" or religious syncretist (abangan) vote across class lines. This situation differs from 1955 and 1957 (when there were local elections in some regions) when PNI was under pressure from and was increasingly losing to PKI, the Indonesian communist party. The most determinedly leftist party today, the PRD or Democratic People's Party, whose rhetoric is strongly reminiscent of the old PKI, failed to win a single seat in 1999 and is not growing at the rate required to be a serious player in 2004. In other words, non-devout or syncretistic Muslims and non-Muslims have no place else to go.

Third, they know that the pious Muslim (santri) opposition is as fragmented as the nationalists or syncretists are united. Moreover, the Muslims show no sign that they are capable of or interested in building a new grand coalition on the scale of the Poros Tengah (Central Axis) that elected Abdurrahman president in 1999. If anything, they are becoming more fragmented and less able to put together a broad Muslim coalition.

In 1955 two Muslim parties, Masyumi (21 percent) representing modernists (or at least dominated by leaders from the modernist social and educational organization Muhammadiyah) and Nahdlatul Ulama or NU (18 percent), representing traditionalists, won nearly 40 percent of the vote. Today the traditionalists are split: There are many NU leaders and voters in Golkar and PPP as well as in PKB. During the New Order, NU as a political party was able to maintain its electoral strength against the depredations of the authoritarian Soeharto. In the heavily managed 1971 parliamentary election it received almost exactly the same vote as it had in the free election of 1955. As far as I can tell (without proper surveys), NU voters continued to choose PPP, into which they had been incorporated politically, at least up to the election of 1981.

NU's successor party, PKB (formally established by NU in 1998), however, won only 12 percent. In Jakarta in July, its leaders told me that their main strategy for 2004 is not to win back some of those NU votes that stayed with PPP or went to other parties -- they are lost forever, I was confidently (but probably wrongly) told -- but rather to broaden PKB's appeal beyond traditionalist and even beyond Muslim voters. In the short run, at least, this strategy is not likely to win many more votes. It was already an element in PKB's electoral campaign in 1999, but had virtually no impact. PKB is too deeply rooted in NU culture and social structure to become a broadly-based party over the period of a few election cycles.

Modernists -- probably never as large a group as some of its leaders claim -- and other pious Muslims are even more fragmented, dividing their 1999 vote among Golkar (22 percent of the national vote, but only a portion of Golkar voters were modernist Muslims), PPP (10 percent, but a mix of modernists and traditionalists), National Mandate Party (PAN) ,7 percent, mostly modernists), Crescent Star Party (PBB), 2 percent, mostly modernists), and Justice Party (PK), 1 percent, some modernists, but also some pious Muslims difficult to classify as traditionalist or modernist). PAN's leaders had hoped to capture most of the Muhammadiyah constituency and add to it the support of issue-oriented urban middle class voters, but failed to do so.

For 2004 PAN appears to have given up on the non-modernist constituency, which means that the party's total vote will probably be less than in 1999. Some modernist parties have split since 1999, so the prospect is for more fragmentation among both modernists and traditionalists. PAN's Amien Rais, who claims that his chances of being elected president have been improved by the switch to direct election, has his work cut out for him if he is to unite this diverse and quarrelsome crew.

Fourth, they understand that Megawati is the most well-known and well-liked (if not beloved) Indonesian politician today. Voter perceptions of the qualities of individual leaders appear to play an important part in Indonesian elections, at least according to a survey that I conducted with Saiful Mujani and the University of Indonesia's Political Science Laboratory just after the 1999 elections.