John McBeth, Jakarta – While Indonesian students and other activists were expending their considerable energies trying to get rid of President B.J. Habibie and drag his predecessor to court, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Politicians quietly chipped away at reform initiatives that would have reshaped Indonesia's political landscape.

Introducing better local representation for Indonesia's 130 million voters was one of the guiding principles for the Habibie government's nonpartisan drafting team when it set about revamping the country's electoral and political-party laws after President Suharto's downfall last May.

Yet, fearful of taking a step into the unknown, the ruling Golkar Party – aided and abetted by the leaders of the Indonesian Democratic Party, or PDI, and the United Development Party, PPP – recently discarded proposals for district voting. They settled instead for a modified version of the proportional-representation system that has existed under the New Order administration. Reformers such as Home Affairs Director-General Ryaas Rasyid and his disappointed drafters had to be satisfied with an agreement to reappraise the system in three years' time, when voters have had an opportunity to weigh what the politicians have done.

Now, the National Election Commission, which is charged with making preparations for the June 7 parliamentary polls, has compounded the issue. Largely unnoticed, the commission decided in April to leave it to party leaders to decide after the election which candidates will gain parliamentary seats. Choices may be based on candidates' percentage of the vote or the total number of votes polled. (Electors will vote for parties rather than candidates.) Under the percentage system, a candidate who did well in a small electorate would land near the top of a party list. But if votes are tallied, small electorates with several hundred thousand voters probably won't be represented at all when neighbouring districts have several million constituents. Most analysts believe the numerical system better guarantees seats for party leaders because they are likely to get the most votes in larger constituencies.

At the end of the day, that's likely to give the political elite a vice-like grip on who gets seats in the new 500-seat House of Representatives. "What we have seen is a coup d'etat by the political parties – and no-one even noticed," says a Western expert involved in planning the June elections. "Party leaders want to continue to play God, but what they could get is civil war within their own parties."

All this was probably to be expected. Although the 53-man election commission, known locally as the KPU, is meant simply to organize the election, many of the 48 party representatives on the commission are party chairmen or secretary-generals who seized the opportunity to wield influence. "They're acting more like a parliament than an executive committee," says the Western expert.

The commission's decision to leave parliamentary kingmaking to party leaders isn't the only example of its eccentric sense of priorities. In early April, while a controversy was bubbling over whether ministers would be permitted to take part in the election campaign, they spent a day complaining about the government's lack of assistance in providing campaign funds. "It's not ignorance," says a commission official. "For most of them it's either a last grab, or an effort to get back the investment they put into establishing a party."

Some parties have no real money problems. By most accounts, Golkar is set to spend an average of 1 billion rupiah ($116,000) a district, or more than 300 billion rupiah in total. And judging by the sea of red flags flapping across the length of Java, Megawati Sukarnoputri's new Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle isn't hurting for cash either – in large part because of strong support from Indonesian-Chinese businessmen.

But many of the 45 newcomers to Indonesian politics are struggling. For now, at least, the government has allocated only 150 million rupiah to each of the parties to fund their campaigns. At election-commission meetings, some party representatives have been demanding 10 times that amount. Given that the funding would have to come from the government budget, any such increase would probably require presidential or parliamentary approval.

Political scientist Andi Mallarangeng, one of five government representatives on the commission and a member of the original law-drafting team, opposes any increase. He thinks the parties should find the money themselves – some, he says, are more interested in getting their hands on election funds than in actual campaigning.

For all its politicking and bickering, the election commission has completed about 80% of its work, and Mallarangeng discounts the possibility of the election being postponed. "It's lousy, its messy, there's a lot of partisanship and everything is taking too long," he says. "But things are rolling." Indeed, election committees have been formed down to district level. Registration is 70%-90% complete in many places. And the commission has done the right thing on occasion. Well, almost the right thing.

Take the case of the 413 million ballot papers, which have to be distributed to the 250,000 polling stations across the country for elections covering the House of Representatives and provincial and district parliaments. When the commission got round to considering printers, it discovered that all eight companies with licences to handle government work were owned, or partly owned, by members of the Suharto family and their friends.

Naturally that wouldn't do in the reformation age, so the commission accepted applications from 58 other "nonsecure" printing houses, most of them politically connected in some other way, to perform the work. With the government representatives staying well out of the process, party representatives then whittled that number down to 18 – albeit without a proper tendering process – and designed a special stamp to validate each of the ballots.

For all that, the crowning insult came from Suharto himself. During a recent interview, he suggested Indonesia wouldn't be able to hold a democratic election in the time available. A response wasn't long in coming. Wrapping up a political discussion some days later, a young television host asked viewers rhetorically if the former president's comment should be taken seriously "or seen as the worthless gibberish of a 77-year-old." She left little doubt what she thought.