Megawati Soekarnoputri President of the Republic of Indonesia,

Megawati Soekarnoputri President of the Republic of Indonesia,
2001-2009 (at least)

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.