Kafil Yamin – The recent buzz about the potential for last week's meeting, between former President Megawati Sukarnoputri and Vice President Jusuf Kalla, to lead to a coalition between their respective parties, revealed an essential truth about this year's election, but it wasn't the one most pundits were discussing.
While speculation centered on whether a union between Kalla's Golkar Party and Megawati's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, might just be the tectonic political shift necessary to unseat smooth-sailing incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, the predictable failure of the meeting to produce anything more than smiles and handshakes for the cameras showed that any talk of a coalition before the April 9 elections will likely remain just that: Talk.
What's more, the Kalla-Megawati meeting evidenced little of the long-standing bitter rivalry between Golkar and PDI-P – currently the first- and second-largest parties in the House of Representatives.
After all, when Kalla and Megawati dined on fried rice last week, it was their first public appearance together since Kalla, the coordinating minister for people's welfare under Megawati, left his former boss to join the successful 2004 presidential bid of Yudhoyono, who himself is a former minister in the Megawati government.
The resulting bad blood between the two only adds to the already-existing tension between the two parties' loyalists. Despite treading similar, secular-nationalist ideological turf, the two parties have been shaped in large part by animosity toward one another dating back to the years of the late President Suharto's so-called New Order government, in which Golkar was the ruling machine, and PDI-P emerged under Megawati as a vocal opposition.
Even if the two parties were to overcome their differences to form a coalition and succeed at returning Kalla and Megawati to the State Palace, it's far from clear if the two parties would be able to agree on crucial elements of putting together a government, like allotting cabinet seats.
And that is to say nothing of another key issue not even discussed at last week's meeting: Which one of the two would run as president.
The fact of the matter is that while Megawati is the clear and – for this election at least – unchallenged head of PDI-P, Golkar is anything but firmly united behind Kalla.
Former senior Golkar members Prabowo Subianto and Wiranto seek to nibble away at the Golkar base with their own parties – the Great Indonesia Movement Party, or Gerindra, and the People's Conscience Party, or Hanura, respectively.
Other current Golkar leaders have also roundly criticized Kalla for his management of the political party.
Some senior Golkar party members have also looked to the candidacy of Yogyakarta Governor Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X, himself a Golkar member, contending that the sultan's popularity makes him a viable national candidate in a way that Kalla's lagging popularity in recent polls suggest he is not.
"He has a genuine nationalistic vision," said Lili Romli, an analyst at Indonesia Institute of Sciences, or LIPI, of the Sultan.
"Jusuf Kalla has a stronger grip on Golkar than the Sultan does," Lili said, adding that the sultan will have to prove that he is not bound by the feudal approach to governance his title might imply.
Whatever the challenges the sultan might face, his relative popularity suggests that Kalla's recent declaration of his readiness to accept the Golkar presidential nomination hardly marks the party's final word on the subject.
The key factor determining what kind of coalitions would nominate presidential candidates, however, isn't whether Golkar can get over its internal divisions to rally behind a single candidate. It isn't about the machinations of countless smaller parties to set up "alternative coalitions." It isn't even whether or not Kalla, Megawati and their two parties can get over their history of animosity and strife.
The key factor shaping future coalitions will be decided on April 9, when the public heads to the polls to vote in the legislative elections. The threshold rule mandating that parties or coalitions of parties must account for 20 percent of the popular vote in the legislative elections, or 25 percent of the seats in the House, will transform the political calculus of the parties involved.
The flurry of polls that have political party leaders claiming with certainty that they will reach various ambitious targets also show that 20 percent to 30 percent of voters remain undecided about who they will pick. A last-minute rise for either PDI-P or Golkar might mean they could team up with a smaller party to nominate their preferred candidate, thus avoiding a showdown between the two major parties.
These scenarios do not include one other possibility that has been on the lips of other astute political observers. Polls show that Yudhoyono's Democratic Party may very well pass the 20 percent threshold on its own strength and take a plurality in the national elections. The party would then be in a position to nominate a technocratic candidate from among its own ranks to round out another Yudhoyono-led ticket, an option that would potentially give Yudhoyono a key ally in the next cabinet and that would help avoid the sort of distrust and mutual suspicion that have characterized the current presidential pair's relationship.