Our democratic tug-of-war

The following is the first of two articles based on a presentation by Dr. Ignas Kleden of The Go-East Institute/Institute for East-Indonesian Affairs in Jakarta. The sociologist spoke at the Asian Leadership Fellow Program Reunion Conference 2001 in Bangkok on Aug. 7.

JAKARTA: The German philosopher Juergen Habermas has recently published his Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. This opus can be seen as a continuation of Habermas' discourse on the theory of morality and its implementation in the political and legal sector. It can also be treated as a continuation of his theory of the public sphere and how this contributes to "deliberative democracy."

The basic assumption of deliberative democracy is that citizens' participation in the democratic process have a rational character; that voting, for example, should not simply aggregate preferences but rather follow on a process in which citizens become informed of the better argument and more general interest.

This basic assumption seems to rest, however, on some fairly unexamined anthropological beliefs. First, it is assumed that people who engage in a political discourse compete for an argument with more truth content than other arguments. Second, once the better argument has been achieved, most people can be persuaded to accept that argument by demonstrating the higher degree of truth content. Third, once people are convinced intellectually of the truth content, they will become psychologically motivated and satisfied with the new enlightenment.

The recent political changeover in Jakarta on July 23 can exemplify some difficulties in applying Habermas' theory to realpolitik. Based on the 1945 Constitution, the president and the House of Representatives are of equal power and position. The president is therefore in no position to dissolve the House while the latter has no political capability and legal right to impeach the president. This balance of power is because the president is installed in office not by the House but by the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR). So the president is subordinate to the Assembly, gets his presidential power as a mandate of the Assembly, and is obliged to make his administration accountable in its General Session at the end of his term.

In an emergency, however, the House is entitled to propose a special session to the Assembly to ask for the accountability for some of the president's measures which are considered fundamentally deviant or politically dangerous. The question is what should be a sufficient reason for the House to make such a proposal and on what grounds would the Assembly find it necessary to call for a special session? This question becomes particularly important if the political relationship between the president and the House as well as the Assembly happens to be aggravated by mutual dislike and personal rivalry, as was the case with president Abdurrahman and Akbar Tandjung, the House speaker and Amien Rais, the Assembly speaker.

In this balance of power, the president's position is fairly shaky. The president is subject to accountability, whereas the House is not obliged to give its accountability because this is not required by the present system of general elections, whereby a member of the legislature is not directly responsible to his or her constituency.

The same can be said of the Assembly which seems to be responsible to nobody except to itself because it is the most supreme political institution. With regard to the real balance of power, a proposal for the special session of the Assembly can be canceled if the president is supported by a majority of members of the legislature. Abdurrahman was supported by no more than his 11 percent-strong National Awakening Party (PKB), which he helped establish before his presidential election.

The trigger toward the special session was the installment of the acting National Police chief on July 20 by Abdurrahman, shortly after he fired the National Police chief. An Assembly decree rules that the installment or dismissal of the National Police chief needs approval of the legislature -- which Abdurrahman did not secure. This was the main reason for the disobedience of the incumbent police chief. Strangely, there was no protest from both the person concerned and from the House.

The incumbent Gen. S. Bimantoro himself was installed to that position by the president without the House approval. Be that as it may, the House found the installment of the acting police chief highly dangerous since it could create dualism within the police leadership, something which was feared to jeopardize political stability and national security.

The rest was nothing but a psychological tug of war between the president and the legislature on the one hand, and between the president and the opposing political parties on the other. On the evening of July 22 there was an informal meeting of chairpersons of all big political parties at the private house of Megawati Soekarnoputri. After the meeting, Amien stated that hopefully Indonesia would have Megawati as the president in the next two or three days. This statement was made by Amien in response to Megawati's request to him to speak as the Assembly speaker. The episode was totally confusing, because those high- ranking politicians were invited as representatives of their political parties, and yet Amien was asked by Megawati to speak as the Assembly speaker.

This was not politically correct because the Assembly speaker should have only been able to speak on behalf of the Assembly in a session, but never on his own behalf.

The situation then led Abdurrahman to become totally out of control, as reflected in his presidential decree declared at 1:10 a.m. the next morning. The decree stipulated first, the dissolution of the Assembly and the House; second, the freezing of Golkar as a political party; and third, that the general election be held in one year.

Obviously the president went too far. The House was his political and constitutional equal, whereas the Assembly was his constitutional superior. The freezing of Golkar as a political party could only be done with the approval of the Supreme Court.

Hence after the decree was announced, House Speaker and also Golkar Party chairman Akbar Tandjung asked for the Supreme Court's legal opinion. The answer was that the presidential decree to suspend the House and the Assembly violated the Constitution, whereas the freezing of Golkar was rejected.

The Assembly then found it safe to convene the Special Session at 8 a.m. on July 23, in which all parties present (those absent were the two parties which walked out) agreed to impeach Abdurrahman and to install Megawati as the new president, in line with the 1945 Constitution.

In this critical situation, Abdurrahman had practically no political support from almost all political institutions. The Assembly, the House, the Supreme Court, the military and National Police were all against him. Even the media did not show great efforts to give a balanced and well-thought reporting and opinion about the position of both the president and the legislature. The only support came from PKB and from individual supporters -- religious figures, activists, groups of students, as well as leaders and rank and file of Nadhatul Ulama, the biggest Muslim organization once chaired by Abdurrahman.

What can be seen in this situation? There is a split here between what Habermas called "system integration", which works according to functional relations within the system and "social integration", based on values and norms. Those who sided with Abdurrahman at that critical moment seemed to believe that he was a man seriously committed to some basic values of democracy such as freedom, equality before the law, human rights and protection for minorities.