Ridwan Max Sijabat – House of Representatives lawmakers have agreed to let political party leaders decide some of the most crucial issues surrounding pending revisions to the law on legislative elections.
Yasonna Laoly, a lawmaker from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), and Agun Gunandjar Sudarsa, a lawmaker from the Golkar Party, confirmed that their parties' leaders had met several times to discuss the bill.
"The concessions made by the party leaders will be passed on to members of their faction, who will make a decision on the eve of the bill's endorsement," Agun said on Thursday.
The special committee deliberating the bill, slated to go before the full House in March, agreed to let party leaders to decide the bill's fate, after representatives of the House's nine factions failed to resolve differences on revising the electoral system, the electoral threshold, the number of seats for each electoral districts and a vote-counting mechanism.
The PDI-P, Golkar Party and the Democratic Party (PD) want to increase the electoral threshold from 2.5 percent to somewhere between 3 to 6 percent, claiming it would make governing more efficient, while the House's six smaller parties want to keep the threshold unchanged.
Another contentious issue is electoral system reform. PDI-P lawmakers in the House want to revert a closed-list proportional system that would allow parties to nominate qualified candidates, while the other parties back the present open-list system.
The House's three largest parties, however, were in agreement on a proposal to redraw electoral district boundaries and reduce the number of House seats allotted to each district. The smaller parties do not want to change district sizes or seat allotments to maximize their chances of winning more seats outside their existing strongholds.
Parties in the House are also at odds on requiring the General Election Committee (KPU) to count votes manually or to introduce electronic vote counting.
On the electoral threshold, Yasonna said 5 percent was modest and consistent with the 1945 Constitution, which mandated a multi-party system with no more than 10 parties.
"Small parties should not be concerned about a higher electoral threshold because there's no guarantee that even major parties will have a guarantee that they can reach it. It will depend on their performance during the five-year period," he said.
Meanwhile, according to Yasonna, the PDI-P wanted to revert to the closed-list system implemented during the New Order, believing that the current open list system had failed to produce qualified legislators.
"Many people, including celebrities, have used money and their popularity to win seats while qualified candidates lost in the election because they had no money," he said.
Separately, Ray Rangkuty, the executive director of the Care Forum for Democratic Elections, slammed the decision to leave the fate of electoral reform in the hands of political party big-wigs.
"The House's factions have sidelined the interests of the public and are fighting only for their own interests," Ray said.
The law on elections has been amended three times in the Reform era, which Ray said demonstrated that parties wanted to maintain their roles as contenders, regulators and referees in elections.