Jose Manuel Tesoro, Jakarta – For three months, the third floor of Indonesia's parliament complex resembled a workers' dormitory. Figures dozed on the dirty floor as clothes hung out to dry.
Heaps of rice, soybean cake and chili sauce sat out, the daily sustenance of the some 50 laid-off laborers who had occupied the room on behalf of their 4,600 colleagues. Until October last year they had assembled sneakers. Now the workers wanted the MPs to pressure their factory's Hong Kong-based owner to grant all its employees a proper severance package. "They are representatives who were chosen by the people," said union leader Karel Sahetapi of the lawmakers. "So they should really struggle for the rights of the people."
It is a reasonable request to make of Indonesia's legislature, elected last July in the country's first free multiparty elections. But like the workers' demands themselves, it is not one legislators can very easily answer. (The protesters were eventually kicked out on May 10.) As reports of corruption – from the president's inner circle down to lowly provincial councilors – spread, Indonesians are finding that despite new political laws, their leaders remain largely unaccountable.
A local newsmagazine recently revealed that President Abdurrahman Wahid's masseur had gotten an official at the rice monopoly Bulog to withdraw over $4 million from workers' funds. In exchange, the ambitious official was promised he would become Bulog's new chief (he didn't). Attention has also focused on the appointment of Wahid's younger brother to the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency as a self-described "debt collector."
New laws passed in February 1999 restructuring elections, allowing new political parties and reconfiguring the make-up of parliament and the electoral college have not dealt a death blow to Indonesia's closed, collegial, elitist political culture. Nor have constitutional amendments passed in October asserting the authority of the legislature and limiting the power of the executive done much to check the president's oft-used – and abused – prerogative. The bad news is that despite Indonesia's exit from one-man rule, power has come to rest not in the hands of the people but instead in a handful of fractious party leaders. The good news is that legal experts, civil-society groups and, yes, even the legislature are slowly and quietly at work to start fixing the system.
The new laws largely preserved the old electoral system. The draft law had proposed a combination of two systems: the district (in which voters directly choose MPs in their areas) and the proportional (in which voters pick parties, which in turn select the representatives). The legislature opted for the latter system, retaining party leaders' wide-ranging authority to choose who gets the much-coveted MP assignments.
"With proportional representation, there is no accountability," complains Andi Mallarangeng, a member of the law-drafting team. "They are party representatives, not people's representatives." Hence, key decisions in the legislative body are monopolized ultimately by party bosses, among them President Wahid, Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri and legislature chairmen Amien Rais and Akbar Tanjung. But as election experts point out, the district system is no panacea: In a first-past-the-post contest, candidates may still go all out to buy local voters. The debate continues.
Written into the new electoral law is a required review of the system three years after the July elections. The law's original drafters are starting by asking to change the composition of the General Election Commission, where infighting by representatives of small political parties had helped delay the final result of the polls. If the bill is passed, they will be replaced by independent figures with no party affiliations.
More changes are at work within the highest legislative body, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR by its Indonesian initials). Since the end of last October's session, a 90-member "working group" has been planning amendments to the 1945 Constitution. After months of hearings, the commission is to begin drafting new amendments for debate and presentation to the MPR in August.
The possible proposed amendments touch upon a wide range of issues: the electoral system, the structure of the legislature, the balance between branches of government, the independence of the Supreme Court, even a bill of rights for Indonesians. The most controversial proposal could be to allow the president to be directly elected, rather than appointed by the MPR. If passed by the required two-thirds of the MPR, the amendments could have far-reaching consequences on both the structure of government and the nature of Indonesian democracy.
Over a dozen civil groups have banded together to get citizens to fax in support for a direct-election system. "There are a lot of advantages to direct election," says Muryono Prakoso of the Center for Electoral Reform. "It will form stronger legitimacy and the president's accountability to the electorate will be direct."
Ultimately, though, more representative politics depends on the parties, which have the authority to pass, revise or reject proposed laws and to choose MPs. How much are they willing to give up the power the system invests in them?
Ironically, one of the biggest opponents to change is Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) – even though Megawati would probably have been elected president last year had a direct system been in place. Jakob Tobing, a PDI-P lawmaker and chairman of the commission studying the amendments, says his party does not support direct election "because of the technicalities and the social and political costs."
Thus, there is a third – and least observed – aspect to perfecting Indonesian democracy: party reform. And that depends on party leaders, who, as recent party congresses have shown, have little interest in changing their top-down control. Julia Suryakusuma, director of an effort last year to catalog 141 registered parties, points out: "Parties are a creation of people just to grab a piece of power."
Beyond the imperfect laws and the patchwork Constitution, the continuing belief in parties as vehicles for personal ambition rather than popular aspirations may prove one of the biggest obstacles to reforming and cleaning out the airless and still unaccountable Indonesian political system. Whereas Thailand and the Philippines were able to get much of their new political framework in place early, Indonesia is evolving one slowly, incrementally and on an ad hoc basis. "The elites in Indonesia don't trust the people's will," explains Mallarangeng. "They think they know best. But the people know whom to choose and why." As Indonesia is learning, being a democracy takes more than just holding an election.