Party performance and legitimacy

No word better describes the feelings we had watching the Indonesian Democratic Party's (PDI) performance in the general election, than shock.

When, about a year before the election, Soerjadi proudly accepted the PDI's top job at a congress in Medan, many observers predicted the party would perform badly. But nobody could have guessed it would be this bad.

The vote counting is as yet (Saturday noon) incomplete. Nevertheless, if the present trend continues, there is a good chance that the PDI will get less than five million votes.

This would mean that the party will have less than ten seats in the new House of Representatives. It would also mean no PDI representatives on some of the national Commissions.

This it turn would raise unanticipated constitutional problems, since any Commission decision must have the support of three factions.

In some democratic countries with multi-party systems, political parties that fail to get a significant number of votes are subject to sanctions. They are not allowed to take part in the following general election. The reasoning, of course, is that parties with insignificant voter support lack legitimacy. The point is, how in the world can a political party claim to be a mass organization without mass support.

The problem confronting the PDI at present could become a constitutional problem for us in the future. It may be that a law is needed to set a minimum number of votes needed by a political party in order to maintain its legitimacy as a social-political organization.

-- Media Indonesia, Jakarta