James Van Zorge – In more ways than one, there is disturbing evidence that Indonesia's politicians have not bothered to read the Constitution. Or, if they have read it, they prefer to pretend otherwise.

It sounds too surreal to be true, but what else could explain the fact that the president, his cabinet and most of the House of Representatives have been behaving like they are working under a parliamentary system?

Thankfully, a lot of Indonesians outside the world of politics intuitively understand the heart of the matter. When I recently asked some Indonesian friends what they thought about their president, one of them told me he felt that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is acting like a weak prime minister in what is undeniably a presidential system.

Another friend commented that although Yudhoyono is the president, his behavior suggests otherwise: "He won more than 60 percent of the popular vote, and what does he do? He turns around and gives his powers away to others. Why can't he remember we voted for him?"

A good point. But perhaps the problem isn't that the president is suffering from a bad case of memory loss.

Even for a legal layman like myself, it seems pretty clear from reading the Constitution that Indonesia has a presidential system: The president is voted directly into office by the people, he has the sole right to appoint his cabinet, he is the supreme commander-in-chief of the armed forces and he shares powers with the House of Representatives.

Now here's the critical point: Nowhere in the Constitution is there any mention of the word "parliament." For good reason: Unlike in a parliamentary system, the Indonesian executive does not need the consent of the legislative branch to form a government, and there are no mechanisms for the legislature to dissolve the government. In a presidential system, the powers of the two branches are separate. In a parliamentary one, the executive and legislative branches of government are intertwined. This is why, under normal circumstances, presidents in presidential systems don't build coalitions to govern and prime ministers in parliamentary democracies often face the necessity of bringing parties other than their own into the cabinet.

Once you understand this, a logical question would be, if this is a presidential system, then why has Yudhoyono invited party figures outside his own to populate the cabinet?

One reason might be that Yudhoyono actually believes that a coalition would guarantee support for his presidency inside the House and therefore enable him to win majority consensus on legislation. Another reason might be that because he thinks he has many enemies, he needs to curry favor to buy their loyalty.

All of those reasons, if they were true, would make for pragmatic politics. But let's look at the facts.

In spite of coalition cabinets, the House has never really supported a presidential legislative agenda. If you don't believe me, consider this irony: Because the House rarely drafts its own legislation and votes primarily on bills being proposed by the executive through its ministries, and because most of these ministries are under the direction of men and women who belong to parties other than the president's (thanks to the coalition), then what the House is basically voting on are pieces of legislation whose authors don't feel any obligation toward the president and his party.

The bottom line? By having a coalition cabinet, what the president really buys himself is support for a legislative agenda he doesn't own. The president, then, is serving everybody except himself, not to mention imparting a great injustice to the voters who supported him and his party in the elections. Once you understand this, then it is no longer a mystery why a man who ran for office on a liberal, reformist platform ends up with an administration proposing and the House voting in favor of illiberal laws.

But perhaps this was not Yudhoyono's main concern (although it obviously should have been) when setting up his so-called coalition. Perhaps the president's real objective in this whole exercise has been to ensure his survival.

If that is true – if the main underlying value of a coalition is that it buys loyalty – then the most obvious question is, why did the Bank Century case ever happen?

After all, it is no secret that the Century affair, which was built on the flimsiest of legal foundations and had more to do with unfounded allegations and hyperbole than facts, was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt by Golkar – Yudhoyono's main coalition partner – to grab control of the Finance Ministry and the vice presidency.

More than that, Century was a classic case of extortion performed by a cast of unsavory characters with a clear message to the president: "Hand over Sri Mulyani and Boediono, or we'll go after you."

The reality is, Yudhoyono's coalition fell short of expectations, and if he ever harbored hopes of it enhancing his ability to lead, it failed horribly.

Which brings us to the current picture. Now that the dysfunctionality and perverse effects of his coalition have been exposed, for some odd reason Yudhoyono is going out of his way to maintain it. It reminds me of former US President George W Bush being asked what his back-up plan for winning the Iraq war would be if his administration's initial strategy didn't work. In other words, if Plan A failed, what was Plan B? Bush's answer was "if Plan A doesn't work, Plan B is to try Plan A again!"

Indeed. And here is Yudhoyono's Plan B: Take Golkar boss Aburizal Bakrie – the same man behind the Bank Century attacks – and make him the managing chairman of a new creation called the joint coalition secretariat. Hence, Yudhoyono's reasoning must be that since coalition members attacked him, the best way to deal with the problem is to try keeping the coalition together by elevating his most dangerous enemies inside the coalition to run it.

This strategy might make sense to the president – maybe he believes it is better to keep closer to his enemies than his friends. Yudhoyono should be reminded, however, that Bakrie and his Golkar Party are severely limited in their ability to impeach either the vice president or the president himself. Again, reading the Constitution would be instructive, for once you understand the rules of impeachment, the more you understand how unlikely it is that the president's enemies could actually succeed in unseating him.

Now, if somebody out there could please send the president a copy of the Constitution?

[James Van Zorge is a manager of Van Zorge, Heffernan & Associates, a business consultancy based in Jakarta. He can be reached at jamesvanzorge@yahoo.com.]