New president under new era of democracy

New president under new era of democracy

Gwynne Dyer, London

Vote for "the prettiest candidate," said Indonesia's President
Megawati Soekarnoputri as the election campaign got underway, and
the voters took her at her word. On Sept. 20, they voted
overwhelmingly for her former chief security minister, Susilo
Bambang Yudhoyono, who is no beauty -- but then, neither is she,
and at least he sings very nicely. None of his campaign rallies
was complete without a rendition of Rainbow in Your Eyes by the
former four-star general and his wife, Kristiani Herrawati.
The voters loved it.

Susilo is actually quite a serious man who was seen by his
army colleagues as efficient and incorruptible, but even his
closest adviser, Muhammad Lutfi, admitted: "This election is not
about policy. This is a popularity contest so we sell (him) like
a brand image." It's enough to give you doubts about the future
of Indonesia's new democracy.

It's not just Indonesia. There has been an avalanche of new
democracies in the past twenty years, and there are doubts about
the quality of democracy in a lot of them. At the same time,
many people in these countries have become nostalgic for the
sheer stability of the old regimes: In a poll conducted by the
Asia Foundation last December, 53 percent of Indonesians agreed
with the statement: "We need a strong leader like Soeharto (the
former dictator, overthrown in 1998)...even if it reduces rights
and freedoms."

The United Nations Development Programme has calculated that
eighty-one countries moved towards democracy in the 1980s and
1990s, and that by 2002 one hundred and forty of the world's
almost two hundred independent nations had held multi-party
elections. The old-fashioned tyrannies are a dwindling minority,
and this year will see more free elections than ever before: 110
of them, according to the International Institute for Democracy
and Electoral Assistance.

Only thirty years ago, the only real democracies in Asia were
India, Sri Lanka and Japan, and there were only about a dozen in
Europe. The last genuine democracies in Latin America were
foundering under a new wave of military coups, and the Middle
East and Africa were practically democracy-free. It has been an
astonishingly rapid transformation -- which may explain why
people seem so ungrateful for their liberation.

Most of the world's democracies are new, and many are still
suffering from the economic upheavals that accompanied the
process of democratization. The voters are inexperienced, so
demagoguery works better than in the older democracies (not that
it doesn't often work in those countries, too).

There is also the disillusionment that comes when people
realize that changing the political system does not solve all the
country's problems. It just changes our way of dealing with them,
hopefully for the better, but it's bound to take some time for
the benefits to become apparent.

When a society opts for democracy, it is betting that the
collective wisdom of the majority is superior to the judgment of
any single powerful individual or group. That is almost
certainly true in the long run, but it can be quite wrong in the
short run. On the other hand, the kind of individuals who rise to
power in tyrannies are even more prone to catastrophic errors of
judgment.

Take Indonesia. The thirty-year Soeharto dictatorship,
covering most of the country's independent history, delivered
economic growth but siphoned off most of the profits for the
benefit of a narrow elite of the dictator's cronies and
collaborators.

The three presidents who have governed the country in the six
years since Soeharto's overthrow, chosen by a parliament where
interest groups that were powerful under the old regime still had
much influence, were disastrous in different ways, but all were
incapable of addressing Indonesia's problems effectively.

By contrast, in the first election where Indonesians were
allowed to vote for a president directly, they have rejected the
do-nothing incumbent, Megawati, the not very bright daughter of
independence hero Sukarno, and also the man who was tipped as her
successor, indicted war criminal Gen. Wiranto, in favor of the
plodding sincerity, dogged honesty and fine singing voice of
Susilo. The popular wisdom may not be all that sophisticated,
but it probably isn't wrong, either.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.