Indonesia's political parties are hardly paragons of consistency, but the sheer number of flip-flops in the past week, culminating in Monday's grueling debate and vote over raising the subsidized fuel price, took their political grandstanding to another level.
The plenary session, meant to approve the revised state budget and its attendant supporting measures for the price hike to be announced by the government, came unstuck from the moment it began at 10 a.m., with a constant stream of interruptions by legislators slowing the agenda to a crawl.
The Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), which in the past week has switched its stance on the hot-potato issue at least twice, settling as of Friday on the ruling coalition's line of supporting the increase, stayed true to form when its legislators made their latest U-turn on Monday and said they were once again opposing the policy.
Fahri Hamzah, a PKS legislator, told the meeting it was the government that had failed to ensure a sound and judicious energy policy, and it was now making the people pay for that failure by raising prices at the pump.
"There are many anomalies in the government's campaign claim that the current subsidy isn't benefiting those it's meant to help," he said. "So that means this administration has for the past eight years knowingly run a flawed subsidy policy. So how are they going to make up for this?"
He urged the government to "be more sensitive to the feelings of the people," and implied that the ruling Democratic Party was pushing for the increase now so that it could propose a cut next year, just before the elections.
The PKS was one of two coalition parties, along with the Golkar Party, that resisted a proposed fuel price hike in March last year. This year, it appeared on track to toe the coalition line before making an about-face and stating it would oppose the policy.
But last week, amid mounting speculation about the party's future in the coalition, it emerged that PKS legislators at the House Budget Committee had in fact approved unanimously of the supporting measures for the price hike to be brought before the plenary session.
The opposition Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), meanwhile, voiced its opposition to the policy early on, but as Monday's plenary session drew near, it gave indications that it might switch sides.
Prabowo Subianto, the Gerindra chief patron and cofounder, whom analysts say is trying to woo the Democrats for their backing in next year's presidential election, expressed his approval of the fuel price hike, saying it was important in keeping the subsidy from ballooning out of control.
"What's clear is that we see no sense in the state burning up Rp 300 trillion [$30.3 billion] every year [on the subsidy]. We need to allocate the budget more productively," he said. Gerindra legislators, however, felt otherwise.
In the end, with no consensus in sight, House Speaker Marzuki Alie called for the revised budget to be brought to a vote.
As expected, legislators from the five parties supporting the hike – the Democrats, Golkar, the National Mandate Party (PAN), the United Development Party (PPP) and the National Awakening Party (PKB) – voted unanimously in favor of passing the budget, with 338 votes for.
The parties opposed – PKS, Gerindra, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and the People's Conscience Party (Hanura) – also voted unanimously, but could only muster 181 votes. And with that, the budget passed.