Louise Williams, Jakarta – The Government-backed Golkar Party has won a sweeping victory in Indonesia's national elections, but it was overkill.
The cost has been to virtually destroy the carefully managed political balance which has channelled and diffused opposition during President Soeharto's three decades in power.
The small Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) has been virtually knocked out of the political picture as a result of Government manipulations, leaving a new and potentially destabilising political equation, pitting the secularist Soeharto Government against the Muslim-oriented opposition in a majority Muslim nation.
The result was "the worst Indonesia has ever had", one senior Western diplomat said. "The implications are the emergence of a two-party system which pits Islam against the State."
With three-quarters of the vote counted yesterday, the Golkar group held an overwhelming lead with 73.4 per cent of the valid vote, up from 68 per cent in 1992 and the highest tally since Mr Soeharto formally assumed power in 1967.
The Muslim-based United Development Party (PPP) also increased its vote - from 17 per cent in 1992 to 23.6 per cent.
The loser was the PDI, an amalgam of smaller nationalist and Christian parties from the pre-Soeharto period, which saw its vote slashed from 15 per cent to just 2.8 per cent. The PDI result is counterproductive for the Soeharto Government, which tried to reshape the PDI into a meek political ally last year by engineering the ouster of its popular chairman, Ms Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of Indonesia's founding President Soekarno.
Ms Megawati earlier announced that she would boycott yesterday's polls, instructing her supporters not to vote for the Government-approved PDI faction permitted to contest the polls, and a significant bloc of voters appears to have followed.
"It is a big moral victory for the [Megawati] PDI," the diplomat said. "It shows the Government failed to destroy her and to control the PDI votes."
No figures were immediately available on the percentage of spoiled ballots, which would show whether the so-calledGolongan Putih (Blank Group) protest vote against the highly-controlled electoral system had been significant.
The PPP claimed its scrutineers had been intimidated and harassed and were unable to observe counting.
On the eve of the poll the party had spoken out about threats it said were made to rural villagers to force them to vote Golkar. The PPP claimed that civil servants in the capital, who are obliged to support Golkar, were given two voting cards.
Troops were being deployed in PPP strongholds in the capital in anticipation of potential protests as more results were announced and overnight unrest was reported in East Java.
With the PDI savaged, the Soeharto Government's main opponent is a Muslim-oriented party with a significant and volatile grass roots following.
"Five years ago we the [Megawati] PDI confronting the Soeharto Government," said a leading sociologist, Professor Arief Budiman. "Now it is Islam confronting the Government and an increasing polarisation of the system.
"This is potentially dangerous because people will talk about emotive issues like Islam versus non-Islam in politics, instead of issues like development and the economy."
The prospect of an Muslim-oriented opposition is worrying both for the Government and many Indonesians in a nation which has worked hard to overcome splits along religious, ethnic and racial lines.
Riots during the past year have seen Muslim mobs attack Christian and Chinese targets, reflecting widespread resentment over the economic dominance of the ethnic Chinese minority and their partners within the ruling political elite.
The leadership of the PPP has been careful to condemn violence and play within the rules of the tightly controlled Indonesian political system but the often violent rallies which characterised the election campaign pointed to a more aggressive grass roots following, united around Islam, and seeking a more aggressive confrontation with the Government.