No more 'buying cats in a sack' in 2004

Reforms to the Constitution make the voters more responsible for who leads the country as they will now vote for the president as well as regional representatives. The electoral system has also been changed.

For the first time in history Indonesians will actually vote for human beings, not merely party symbols.

The old days when the people had to select a pig in a poke or use the Indonesian expression "to buy a cat in a sack" are gone. The candidate "cats" will now be out of the sack and listed on the ballot papers for all voters to see.

The implications of this change is both less and more significant than meets the eye. Much popular thinking believes that if the people can vote for a particular candidate from their party, rather than getting stuck with whoever the party machinery puts up, "bad" candidates can be thrown out of parliament. Unfortunately a few twists in the electoral laws pretty much guarantee this won't happen. Without getting into statistical details, it is highly improbable that candidate number 2 or 3 will be elected if candidate number 1 is not also elected.

However this is not to say that changes will not take place. What we will see is that when voters look at the candidate list of the parties and see people they do not like, they will actually move their vote to another party with less odious candidates. Alternatively a party with popular candidates can be expected to see these people attract voters away from other parties. For parties, therefore, these new laws will actually start to force changes in the way they operate. The days when Central Party Boards sitting in smoke filled rooms in Jakarta could unilaterally decide who would be a candidate and, in which district, are now numbered.

Parties that don't get this message and continue to stuff their candidates lists with members and friends of the Central Party Board in Jakarta will suffer the consequences by receiving less votes than they could. The answer for the parties will be for the Central Party Boards to accept information on who will or will not be effective candidates. This information is only available locally. This means Central Party Boards will have to rely on the advice from their branches. This change in relationship between party HQ and its regions can support the emergence of genuinely democratic and decentralized structures within parties. This will remove the dangerously top-heavy power structures that have brought about so much party division, conflict and collapse throughout Indonesian history.

This will also mean the election of more "local lads" and hopefully "local lasses". While the intellectual elites in Jakarta will lament this development, which has also accompanied regional autonomy, they are quick to forget that until now the House of Representatives (DPR) has been dominated by "Jakarta- based lads". Indeed of the 11,000 candidates for the DPR in 1999, almost 50% came from the Jakarta region while the number in "winnable" positions was actually even higher.

One further crucial development will be smaller electoral districts. This means that to win a seat parties actually need to demonstrate a reasonable base vote. Gone are the days when a party could win a seat with less than 1% of the local vote. In the future if you want to win a seat in some district, your party will need to pull in at least say 5%.

The new Regional Representatives (DPD), provides for genuine equality among the regions in a way that the DPR never could. Many countries have discovered that the provision of equal representation for all their provinces provides a strong basis for sustained and stable national unity. Even so Indonesia's regions' house is constitutionally very weak in comparison to the DPR, especially considering that it is also fully elected. Indeed it is the only example to be found by the writer of a fully elected chamber of parliament that is considerably weaker than its other House. Even so it is well to note that Indonesia's constitutional reform program is still very much work in progress.

The way in which DPD members will be elected is quite intriguing. This will be a legislative chamber in which there are to be no party candidates. In many ways a non-partisan house of parliament is, of course, an oxymoron. We should expect that from the first day the new members take their seats they will begin to seek out allies who will support their programs and policy ideas and also to identify those who are likely to oppose them. This process of aggregating political and other interests is precisely one of the core functions of political parties.

Indeed the wags around Indonesia now say that just as the DPR will no longer be elected on the basis of "buying cats in a sack" the DPD will be elected through a process of "buying sacks in a cat"- that is we know you but not your political alliances.

One other issue that will affect election to the DPD will be the "splitting" of votes from similar groups. Let us take the hypothetical example of East Java, the homeland of "Traditionalist Islam". In these elections let us say a few dozen well known Ulema across the province seek election. At the same time one secular nationalist, one "Modernist Muslim", one labor activist and one NGO activist seek election. The election result here could well be that none of the "Traditionalist" candidates will be elected while the four elected members may come from these other four groups. They were elected because they did not split their support among a number of candidates appealing to voters from the same part of the electorate. The legitimacy of such an election result may emerge irregardless of the fact that the vote was free and fair.

The effective mobilization of electoral support for a particular vision or set of interests or leaders is yet another core function of parties. -- Kevin Evans