PDI may quit House after election defeat

PDI may quit House after election defeat

JAKARTA (JP): The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) may be
forced to relinquish the House of Representatives seats it won
last Thursday if it does not make the minimum representation of
eleven seats.

After a six-hour plenary session, PDI chairman Soerjadi hinted
yesterday that this could happen. Soerjadi is expected to
announce today whether the party will pull out of the House.

"The decision, whether or not we continue to participate in
the remaining stages of the general election, will be made during
(today's) meeting with representatives of the party's chapters
and branches," he told reporters at the party's temporary
headquarters in Kuningan, South Jakarta.

With ballot counting for Thursday's poll almost completed, the
final results will be announced and approved by the National
Elections Committee on June 18.

New legislators will be installed on Oct. 1.

The PDI suffered a massive defeat in the election, securing
only 10 House seats for its 744 legislative candidates.

Analysts have said the small representation should prompt
changes to House rules on decision making.

This is the worst performance of the nationalist-Christian
alliance, whose popularity peaked in 1992 when it won 52 seats.

Golkar has secured 322 seats and the United Development Party
(PPP) 88 in this election.

Seventy-five of the House's 500 seats are reserved for the
Armed Forces, whose members do not vote.

The PDI failed to win House seats for 19 provinces, including
Jakarta. Indonesia's most populous provinces also snubbed the
PDI. It won only one seat for West Java, two for Central Java and
two for East Java. It won nine, 10 and 12 respectively in 1992.

The results mean that the party's government-backed chairman
Soerjadi, who topped the PDI candidate list for Jakarta, and his
secretary-general Buttu Hutapea, ranked third for North Sumatra,
will have to quit the House in October.

Soerjadi was reinstated as the party's chairman after a
government-backed congress last year ousted chairwoman Megawati
Soekarnoputri. Megawati refused to vote in the general election
on the grounds that it was illegitimate because it allowed
Soerjadi's PDI faction to stand.

Maj. Gen. Hari Sabarno, an Armed Forces House legislator, and
constitutional law expert Satya Arinanto suggested yesterday that
the next House speaker should allow decision making to continue
without the PDI.

House rules, adopted in 1983, say that each of its 11
commissions must have representatives of all three parties and
the Armed Forces. The rules say that decision making requires
signatures from at least two-thirds of House members from the
four factions.

"PDI's under-representation will pose problems not only for
the party, but the House as a whole and the process of the
upcoming general session of the People's Consultative Assembly,"
Hari said.

He said the House would need at least 14 PDI legislators to
function well. Besides the minimum requirement of 11 legislators,
a faction had to have one representative among the leaders of the
House: one in the House's consultative body and another in the
House's inter-parliament cooperative body.

"Even the PDI's current small representation of 56 has caused
problems for the House's decision making process," Hari said.

Hari hailed Golkar's plan to help PDI increase its House seats
by giving it some votes, but said this would require the PPP's
consent.

The three parties will negotiate where the reminder of votes
for each province go, so that all of votes are allocated toward
seats.

PPP deputy chairman Jusuf Syakir said yesterday that the party
would reject negotiations on vote tradeoffs because election law
stipulated that the tradeoffs should have been discussed before
the poll.

Satya, also a secretary of the University of Indonesia's
School of Law, said the government should improve the 1985 law on
political organizations by allowing coalitions between parties
and the establishment of new parties to gain more support than
the PDI did.

"The PDI case reflects the collapse of the government's
political engineering, which assumed that each party other than
Golkar would gain enough House seats," he said. (21/imn/amd)