Who will thriumph at the polls

This is the first of two articles on the mapping of Indonesian politics prepared by Lance Castle, a visiting lecturer in political science at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta.

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Like in the early 1950s, Indonesia has embarked on a long campaign which hopefully will culminate in a general election in June.

Every weekend will see parades and rallies. The streets are bedecked with red, green and blue flags -- yellow has mysteriously disappeared from the ensemble of colors.

Large but flimsily built command posts, called Posko, in every kampong assure the timid that there is strength in numbers.

The tabloids sensationally proclaim the latest plots, coalitions and presidential prospects: President B.J. Habibie versus Armed Forces (ABRI) Commander in Chief Gen. Wiranto? Golkar Party chairman Akbar Tandjung and Minister of Cooperatives and Small Enterprises Adi Sasono have a falling out? Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) chairman Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid supports Golkar? The Dream Team: Megawati Soekarnoputri of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan) for president, Yogyakarta Governor Sultan Hamengkubuwono X for vice president?

Rather decently, the tabloids generally qualify their most outrageous speculations with question marks. But it is clear that by the time we know the winners, the nation will be as tired of politics as the Americans are of Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr.

Still, there is great interest for political scientists, including the amateurs, in trying to predict the outcome, though no doubt Jakarta will not permit bets at high stakes such as enliven elections in London.

Is it possible to predict the outcome, given that it is over 40 years since Indonesia had a free election?

We know that party systems tend to be stable over many decades. (Compare the Democrats versus Republicans in America or the Tories and Laborites in Britain, but remember, on the other hand, the gradual erosion of Congress dominance in India and the two decades in Britain when the two-party system was in abeyance because Labor was replacing Liberal as the anticonservative party.)

There are three ways of estimating the strengths of the parties in Indonesia: Opinion polls, projections based on voters' behavior in pre-New Order elections (with adjustments for changes in the interim), and speculations based on anecdotes and prejudices about "the simple Indonesian voter" which still influence many forecasts. Naturally, this article will rely on the first two, with occasional references to the fallacies of the third.

The results of the 1955 election showed a pattern of voting based on aliran, the great religio-cultural streams of which the Indonesian nation is made up. The result, contrary to expectations, was a great simplification of the party scene.

When a voter entered the voting booth, he/she was confronted with a paper listing up to 60 parties, depending on the province, and their logos, and had to choose (puncture) one (most voters then were illiterate).

Nearly four-fifths picked one of four big parties. The Indonesian Nationalist Party got 57 seats (as compared to 42 in the old unelected parliament), the modernist Muslim Masyumi Party got the same number (44 previously), the traditionalist Muslim NU 45 (up from 8), and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) astonishingly 39 (up from 17).

Clearly, these unsophisticated voters made their distinctions and did not vote randomly, which does not prevent some commentators predicting dire confusion as the result of the 100- odd contenders in the field at present.

While many expected those four to be dominant, most thought several other parties would make a respectable showing. But note -- the previously influential Indonesian Socialist Party went down from 14 to five, the Nationalist People's Party from 13 to two, the Greater Indonesia Party from 21 to two.

Two parties thought to have prospects -- the national- communist Murba party and the Army-sponsored League of the Upholders of Indonesian Independence, got only two seats and four seats respectively.

Consistent with the aliran pattern, the Indonesian Republic Catholic Party and its Protestant counterpart Parkindo got 6 percent of the votes. Incidentally, explicitly regional-ethnic parties, though not banned, did not reach 1 percent of the vote, despite the fact that a regional crisis threatening national breakup emerged only a couple of years after the election.

How stable was the aliran pattern? In 1951, an election in Yogyakarta gave the Muslim parties a good majority of the seats, which they fell far short of attaining in 1955. In 1957, PKI got a substantially higher proportion of the votes in regional elections in Java than it had two years earlier. This shows that shifts can take place within the broad aliran pattern.

On the other hand, NU got almost exactly the same proportion of votes in 1971 as in 1955. Thereafter, it ceased to be counted as a separate party, and the published results of the New Order elections gave no indication of aliran patterns or anything else.

This time, there will be no PKI. But there is every reason to believe that three huge parties will emerge with an enormous majority between them. The People's Awakening Party (PKB) will inherit the NU votes, PDI for Struggle of the non-Muslims and those Muslims (syncretists, seculars or whatever) who object to political Islam, and the National Mandate Party (PAN) led by Amien Rais will get the votes of old Masyumi constituency, more or less the nontraditionalist Muslims.

In each case, there are skeptics who point out that there are other contenders for all three of those rich inheritances. Why should only Amien, Megawati and Gus Dur-Matori Abdul Jalil (of PKB) be the happy legatees?

The simple answer is: There are polls -- not the wealth of polls exploring changes in voting intentions in a variety of regions and social strata which it would be so easy to do, but enough to show who is winning.

A recently published poll in The Jakarta Post shows that about 60 percent of respondents in five cities regarded either Megawati or Amien as the best person to be president. The Sultan of Yogyakarta came next with 15 percent, followed by Gus Dur with about 9 percent. Habibie got a bit over 3 percent, followed by Yusril Ihza Mahendra of the Crescent Star Party (PBB), and former Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin. No one else was significant.

That the sultan got more votes than Gus Dur does not, of course, imply that the former's party (formally he is still Golkar) will do better than PKB, but merely that people realize that Gus Dur is sick, while the sultan is perceived as a suitable president by many people who reject both Megawati and Amien.

A more significant finding is that Yusril, whose party is perceived by many as a stronger contender than PAN for the Masyumi inheritance because it both retained the Masyumi Crescent and Star symbol and loudly advocated an Islamic state, was outnumbered 10-to-1 by Amien.

PBB may not breach the 2 percent limit needed to get seats, and in any case, will play no significant role in the new parliament. Why? We can only say that it has already happened. Amien is on everybody's lips as Mr. Muhammadiyah (Muslim organization), the superclean, superenergetic, superserious new Natsir (the late prime minister), who addressed the students from the steps of the House of Representatives building on the day Soeharto stepped down from his presidency (May 21, 1998); his image has captured the modernist Muslim aliran for his new party.

To ordinary voters, Yusril is a blank, like Hamzah Haz of the United Development Party (PPP) and Akbar Tandjung.

The different, but equally compelling, images of Megawati and Gus Dur have driven out all rivals for their streams. Within the limits of the overriding aliran loyalties, people like to back winners.

It is still common to maintain that Golkar should not be written off; that even if it loses two-thirds of its 1997 votes, it would still be a big bloc in the House (24 percent, plus 80 percent from the ABRI fraction).

This seems to be nonsense, like the incomprehensible claim that Gus Dur "commands" 40 percent of the votes. Barely 3 percent of the poll respondents thought Habibie to be the most suitable president. So will Golkar disappear without a trace? Obviously there is no fun in being a candidate, campaigner or voter for the official government party, when everybody can see that after the election, it will not be the government any more. It would obviously have been better to have decently dissolved the party and its accursed symbols months ago.

That this has not happened only shows that thousands still enjoy the party's patronage in central and regional councils, and that in the world in which they move, they think "established" parties like Golkar and PPP are bound to have an advantage over new parties. This is a fallacy. People are thirsting precisely for what is new. The notion that the unsophisticated villager will vote Golkar because it has a superb organization and vast finances, or because only they are visible to simple people, is nonsense.