Susan Sim, Jakarta – As an article of faith, the logic is sound: Once the economy picks up, the government will be strong again and happy hours will be over for the opposition parties.
A less querulous parliament, especially one that meddles for lack of a real policy agenda of its own, means more time for the executive branch to implement policy and actually govern. Greater political stability will in turn attract capital investment. Ergo, real productive growth: more jobs, higher wages.
Sustain that for another three or four years and a satisfied people will vote for the President again in 2004. But wait, can the economy even sustain the current spurts of growth? Consumer spending on cars and other durables is peaking, or has already plateaued.
The record-breaking US$7.7 billion worth of exports in September included a huge shipment of shrimps to the United States – now Indonesia's largest trading partner – accounting for 20 per cent of non-oil exports. With the US economy set to slide into the downturn of the business cycle, just how many shrimps can Americans eat? And, of course, the foundering rupiah is not going to budge until there is a new team at Bank Indonesia.
Maybe. Who is going to reinvigorate the banking sector and start lending money to the small and medium enterprises which are, surprise, surprise, growing into the vacuum left by the dismantling of the Suharto-era monopolies but will soon suffocate for lack of capital?
Cut to the chase: The Indonesian economy has been growing in spite of the government and parliament. No one will go hungry because the International Monetary Fund is delaying its next aid tranche for another three months and the big-fund boys continue to stay away for the time being.
But the time for leadership, for innovative leaps of strategy, for someone to dazzle the world's entrepreneurs with the scope and audacity of his economic blueprint for Indonesia is at hand.
Can a government that now owns almost 80 per cent of the country's assets afford not to? "Somehow the IMF has turned Indonesia into the world's largest communist country," said one-time adviser to the Ibra restructuring agency, Mr Hasyim Wahid, also better known as President Abdurrahman Wahid's youngest brother.
He thinks it might be time for the government to cut the moral rhetoric it has offered before, accept that it can no longer pretend Ibra will be able to fully recover the liquidity credits it gave the conglomerate owners and allow them to run their businesses again.
Other observers pray not for economic genius, but sheer common sense. Stop chasing away foreign investors by projecting a xenophobic image, especially when the country at large is not, a senior Western diplomat advises.
Do not, for instance, have the highest legislative official in the land, Assembly Speaker Amien Rais, threaten to nationalise American companies on the eve of a visit by some 40 of the world's largest pension funds and money managers.
The Russell 20-20 group, which has some US$7 trillion in capital to invest in emerging financial markets, simply decided to stop its South-east Asia visit in Singapore instead of exploring how it can boost the Indonesian economy, after Mr Rais' anti-American outburst. "It is the art of the self-inflicted wound," the Western diplomat notes. "Somehow Indonesia has become very good at it."