More speed needed
More speed needed
Even as officials are straining to finish the vote count for
last Monday's general elections, public calls to speed up the
election of a new President are growing. The obvious reasoning is
that waiting until the end of October for a new President and
Vice President to be elected, as agreed by President Habibie and
the House of Representatives (DPR) leadership last year, would
leave the country for too long with a lame-duck government -- a
situation which the country can ill afford given current
conditions. This is all the more true since the Habibie
government is seriously lacking in both legitimacy and
credibility.
However, rational as the argument may be, anyone who cares to
observe the confusion accompanying the execution of last Monday's
accelerated general election -- the original plan was for it to
be held only in 2002 -- would understand the hurdles and pitfalls
that are involved in speeding up such a democratic process, and
even more so given that Indonesians have for more than 30 years
missed any experience with multiparty democracy.
Under the Constitution, the President and Vice President are
elected by majority vote by the People's Consultative Assembly,
or MPR, which, as the repository of the people's sovereignty, is
Indonesia's supreme law and policy-making body. Before it elects
a President and Vice President, this assembly must first draft
whatever decrees are relevant to the situation and draw up a
broad outline of policies for the chief executive to implement
during the five years that he, or she, is in office. This, in
essence, is the task that awaits the nation's highest legislative
assembly as far as the process of electing a chief executive and
his deputy are concerned.
But since the MPR is made up of all the 500 members of the
House of Representatives (DPR) plus 200 more representing the
country's 27 provinces and various community groups, both the
DPR, being the national legislature, and the 27 provincial
legislatures must be in place before the MPR can be formed and
convened. Hence the importance of putting more speed into the
counting of last Monday's ballots, including the fixing of
disputes and complaints, to make sure that the deadline of June
21 is met for the announcement of the official count of the
ballots and the allocation of seats to the political parties in
both the national and provincial legislatures.
Some observers are optimistic that it may be possible to
convene the MPR as early as August -- two months earlier than
scheduled -- provided that the final results of Monday's ballot
can be available according to deadline. This, though, may be
easier said than done given the country's geographic make-up and
the inexperience of the manpower available to administer and
supervise the process. Also, the fact that no single party is
likely to win an absolute majority in the new parliament
obviously can make things a good deal more complicated than they
already are.
In any case, the sooner a new government is installed, the
better it will be for the country. Given the state of affairs
this country is in at present, there is no time to be lost to
begin putting things in order. An independent and incorruptible
judiciary must be established to ensure legal certainty and the
rule of law for business and for the citizenry at large. The
state bureaucracy must be thoroughly cleansed and streamlined.
Laws must be drafted and passed to prohibit a return of
autocratic rule and to ensure that the government remains
accountable to people. The list of jobs to accomplish could
continue.
At this point of the process, the positive market reaction to
the first tentative election results appears to indicate that a
speedy establishment of a responsible reformist government is
indeed what market players are waiting for. It would be a pity if
the momentum is lost.